


The Exploding Boy

by bellbawttoms



Category: IT - Stephen King
Genre: 1980s Pop Culture, Enemies to Lovers, Gender Identity, Ghost Stories, Grief/Mourning, HIV/AIDS Crisis, Horror, Jealousy, Jewish Eddie, M/M, Murder Mystery, Narcolepsy, Original Character Death(s), Queer Youth, Recreational Drug Use, Repression, Self-Discovery, Slasher, Strained Relationships, Teenage Losers Club (IT)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-27
Updated: 2021-02-27
Packaged: 2021-03-11 05:27:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 47,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28369860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bellbawttoms/pseuds/bellbawttoms
Summary: If Eddie Kaspbrak shows up after 3 years of silent treatment with a Patrick Swayze haircut and a joint to share, you’ve kind of just got to ask for a hit and go with it. Even if your mom’s just kicked the bucket (gastroesophageal cancer). Even if there’s something awful in the woods (possible phantom serial killer).Life’s short, and all that shit.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 22
Kudos: 32





	1. Belly Up

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _R.I.P. Margaret Anne Tozier  
>    
> A mother, a wife, and a gentle soul. It’s not half worth it without you, Mags._

Richie spends Thursday nights with his friends, always Thursday nights, and it’s a Thursday night that his mom dies. A quarter past nine on September 29th 1992. The exact time he’s just managed to roll Stanley Uris’ fussy green cushions into that one, perfectly comfy divot on his back and that Growing Pains comes on TV. They always watch around fifteen minutes of it. Enough to know what sort of hijinks the Seavers are gonna put their dad through this episode. Whether Richie would ever be able to get away with it, whether Stan thinks the former prediction is realistic. If Patty thinks Kirk Cameron is really very good-looking or he’s just, you know, ‘boyish’. Then, once all three conclusions are come to, and everyone’s fingers are dripping off their second can of pop, Arie Uris’ll materialize at the bottom of the stairs with a tape under his arm. 

“Mom back?” He’ll say, hovering. 

“You know she’s not,” Stan’ll say back. 

Then, with a semi-cheery, “just checking!” Arie will come hopping over the back of a sofa like a cartoon character. Growing Pains will click off, his tape will slip in the player. Moon high in the sky through the ceiling window. These moments are oddly always the ones where Richie feels most like a teenager. With the screen glowing blue on the fray of his jeans and the Uris’ front room smelling like Grizzly menthol cigarettes. It makes him feel real sixteen. 

“Louise-us,” he says in celebration, eyes on the back of Arie’s cream Generra sweater. He’s moved onto the carpet with Stan’s shins digging into his back. Richie can usually tell they’re not Patty’s, ‘cause girls wear their stockings all the time, and Patty never sits upright. She sprawls with her legs on Stanley’s like a twisted up Barbie. “Your brother’s like an archivist or something. How d’you go to Blockbuster _every_ week and find something passable _every_ time?”

Arie itches the back of his curly head as the screen darkens, and the room is now more purple than blue. _Fzzzzzz_. Movie starting. “Look in the guides, I guess,” comes Stan’s voice through the liminality. 

“The guides?”

“Yeah, the movie & video guides. Tell you what critics said.”

Richie huffs his bangs out of his face. In all honesty, he is the kind of person to sit and read a guide. He’ll read it with his head on the side and his tongue flipped sideways on his teeth for concentration but he’ll take his time at it. Mostly just needs to be told. That’s what happened with his comic-books, when he was twelve. (Although this was a rather poor start; “now, if you’re going to scribble for the rest of your life, you’re going to do it right,” Richie’s dad had said gravely, handing him some stuffy library book. “Even Picasso had to start somewhere.”

“Picasso’s dog-shit Dad. I never painted in my life,” was Richie’s instinctual response. He gave the book a wiggle so the _Carlson’s Guide To Landscape Painting_ emblazoned on the front caught Dad’s eye). 

Alas. He’s just got a glimpse of the tape’s cover glowing on the coffee table - Society, 1989. The title is printed in some horribly, sinewy pink and the prospect of watching something packaged so disgustingly excites him. Which in turn makes him sort of want to argue. So Richie says, “you’ve got to be fifty years old and a rocker jockey to read a critics’ guide. If just scanning the cover doesn’t sell you then the movie’s bunk anyways. Good movies have cash to hire good artists, I would know. I am one.”

Patty’s fingers pluck at the back of Richie’s head teasingly. “Artist my ass. You just scribble.”

Richie, faced with the oft-recrudescing anxiety that Patty Blum may be able to see inside his head, whips around to smack her fingers like a cat. She looks a bit crumpled back there, as usual. Never dressed like most of the girls in town. None of the Kitty Hawk or Camp Beverly Hills or rollerskates. She’s a little more new romantic, which you can apparently classify as just by wearing your mom’s old puffball skirt and smudgy charcoal on your eyes, so she’s a little more crumpled too. Patty sinks herself so deep into the couch / Stanley’s lap that all you can see is the gel in her mousy brow. 

That’s probably how Richie’s mom looks, across town just now. Sunken deep and face gleaming oily. The little capsule of oral morphine he had clumsily filled before school for her this morning left untouched on the nightstand. Untouched, while the boy who planted it watches Society 1989 and scratches his ass.

“You know you just said the one thing that could possibly single you out as a non-artist. The one thing. If you were an art girl you’d wanna suck my face off for scribbling ‘cause it’s stimulating and different,” he says, deciding the ordeal of saying ‘suck my face off’ is worth it for the bit. That’s usually how it goes. A never-spoken agreement that Richie can say embarrassing things because he _is_ embarrassing. Or maybe he made that up. “My work is utterly incomprehensible and therefore full of deep significance. Calvin & Hobbes said it.”

“Calvin & Hobbes are two characters. And they’re not real.” 

“Mike Seaver isn’t real and you still want him.” 

Patty flicks her olive-y wrist back like there’s a cigarette in it. She’s got a teasing ‘let me think’ look on her face. “Celebrity crushes...your life’s work...what’s the difference?” She muses theatrically. 

Richie feels like cat-fighting her again, but Arie’s just whipped up off the carpet. His silhouette cookie-cuts black across the title card on TV; just a little curl of the first ‘S’ and the last ‘TY’ peeking around his jeans. “This isn’t a kids’ film, you know. If you keep talking like kids I’ll turn it off,” drifts out from the shadows on his face. He doesn’t mean it, he’s only tooling, Richie knows he is. Arie is definitely Richie’s favorite person over sixteen years old after all, so he knows how he operates. This is mortifying for several reasons. Sure, he’s got shell top sneakers and a sweater just like John Cusack’s in One Crazy Summer. He slides everywhere he walks. He has the world’s most contentious movie opinions (“Caddyshack is the furthest you can possibly get from funny, trust me. You only watch it for Bill Murray and Chevy Chase and the rest of ‘em in those stupid golf outfits. Like how you always think Lifesavers’ soda is gonna be good, ‘cause you know the brand, you know the bottle, then in the end it tastes like strawberry cat piss. Then somehow you drink it again.”) Richie doesn’t know how a person can have all of these traits and still be deemed uncool, but he doesn’t have to. Derry Maine’s done it for him. Arie is a college dropout (English) and more elusively the annual victim of the great senior prom prank 1990. He never talks about it, but if you mention his name at school, people tend to start making chicken noises. It’s all very mysterious. 

“Patty would like that, probably,” Richie says, eyes aching as the screen glare hits him full throttle again. He doesn’t wear his glasses on these Thursday night meet-ups. This will cause him bitter, bitter regret in roughly three years. “She likes Growing Pains!”

Stanley sticks his sweatered sleeves out in annoyance while his older brother flops down next to him, now flanked with four sockless feet, and says, “it was a rerun. The drunk driving special again.”

“Oh, that one’s actually really sad. Carol’s boyfriend seems so good before he dies,” muses Patty.

“That’s meant to be how it happens. Zayde said one of his guys in Vietnam, right before his bullet wound bled out, he just started singing a song. He sang this whole Perry Como song perfectly in tune and then he died.” 

“Shit. Pretty different from drunk driving, though, I guess.”

“I dunno. Death’s death.” 

Richie flips his pop to the side a little dangerously, as he does when he’s feeling self-important. As he does whenever he’s speaking. “Guidance counsellor says different,” he delivers. “She has this worksheet that says if people really don’t wanna die it’s a whole David and Goliath between what they want and the, like, wrath of God. About five worksheets, actually. I think her notes got rained on or something after I said it was my _mom_ dying rather than _me_ \- or she’s seriously wishful thinking. Either way, counting on me getting smoked sometime.”

A halfway silence falls over the other three. The usual kind of thing you get when bringing up actual real life people you know dying, just with a bit of ‘hello, we’ve known each other since kindergarten, we can talk about anything’ looped in on top. They have been semi-bent under the weight of Richie having anything to do with the school guidance counsellor at all for a year now. Of him half the time hyena cackling over his _Moving Violations_ rewatch and the other half ‘bout how his dying mom’s 10mg Morphine gives her poop problems. There’s no reason for it to really be awkward. It’s not like he’s ever cried about it, or even sincerely complained. But again. Embarrassing boy is embarrassing, and generally kindles embarrassment. It’s out of his hands. 

So when Stan says, “you’re still bothering with that counsellor?” while brushing Patty’s big toe out of his eye, he’s technically allowed. As long as they all hold their breath a bit. Find a nice segue into the topic of who’s on Yo! MTV Raps next week, who won’t make it to DND on Monday. All good. 

Richie gives the movie a split second of attention, as that’s the best way to navigate these things. Embarrassing boy is embarrassing but he gives few enough fucks to watch TV with his head cocked back while being as such. It’s at the part where Bill sees his sister look all fucked up in the bathroom, which makes his nonchalant face at least 6% less nonchalant, but. “It’s more that she’s still bothering me. Missus Kelsch writes me down for fifteen minutes every week and I always end up with a twenty five. Last week she gave me a get out of gym free slip. Then we just sat and talked about those jazzercise tapes ‘til lunch. You know she has a whole fucking stack of ‘em in her locker, and leg warmers too? Yeah, powder pink. Sad kids really like jazzercise.”

“Jazzercise,” Stan says slowly, side-eyeing the film and then saving himself. The phone rings quietly in the kitchen. Arie’s leap up for it elbows a little chaplet of Stan’s curls up like a puppy ear. “I don’t follow.”

“You know, the workouts! Like Jane Fonda. Personally I’m into Sweatin’ to the Oldies with Richard Simmons. There’s just something so surreal about donkey kicking to Build me up Buttercup. It’s like you’re at a middle school dance but you’re wearing a leotard, which I think I had a dream about once. Kelsch’s favorite is the Rita...Rita Moreno, yeah, I think you’d like it too. _Exercise lifts the blues, it’s therapeutic - and this I guarantee!_ ” Richie’s Rita Moreno impression comes with a duck back of the head that makes Patty seethe a bit. His mom has that tape, at home. He watched it when he was too sick to make sensible VHS choices as a kid and there was always something vaguely uncomfortable about it. A lot of things like that, in his childhood, actually. Perfectly innocuous memories that Richie took record of as sad by accident. Digger Dan commercial tune, Fruit Brute for breakfast - heartbreak. 

Stan shakes his head as he heel-of-hand smooths it. “Yeah, that’s neat, Richie. My mom uses Judi Sheppard. I just meant I don’t follow why you’re talking to a kind-of therapist about that.”

“Like I said, she bothers me,” Richie says with a shrug. “I don’t have much else to say.”

“You always have something to say.”

“Shucks. I know how to be a man with it, though. Men know how to be open, charismatic and conversational without blubbing about their problems.”

“Right. Like your favorite movie isn’t -“

“That has nothing to do with my manhood, Stanley. I’m just saying. You wouldn’t see Mel Gibson or Harrison Ford crying all over missus Kelsch third period ‘cause, I don’t know, their skin’s breaking out again. They’d probably just get her number and go.” 

“Well. That’s the most nauseating way you could possibly put it, but alright,” Stan says through a suck of the teeth, as Patty gently twirls Richie’s head around by the ear to see if he really _is_ breaking out. He doesn’t fight it. This was kind of his goal anyways. A poke and a peep are his two most valued attention criteria. Arie has just come back in the room, judging by the sudden smell of Doo Dad’s (kitchen door open) and the blotch of orange shadow over the coffee table (Arie hovering in it). Richie relaxes into Patty’s fingers as he waits for the atmosphere to settle again. Almost too much, ‘cause he almost registers that they are quite soft. Pianist fingers. But then the shadow never melts. He pulls himself away to see Arie stock still, hand in the pocket of his Jordaches, looking at least ten miles from settling. In his other hand is the phone. He tips it up like a medieval scroll and looks at Richie with an untranslatable look. “You’ve got a call,” Arie announces at him.

Richie, who has probably never gotten a call on a Thursday night in his life but has somehow always anticipated one, sets his pop down. A move that kicks his hair into his eyes. “They found me, then.”

“Sure. Come plead innocence.” 

He removes Patty’s fingers with the kind of gentleness you could only get out of him when distracted, and follows, feet cold as they cross over onto lino. Sixteen is also the year of said feet going slightly pigeon-toed. Which is totally typical. Like his dad hasn’t been on him about not rolling his shoulders in when he walks since he was tiny and Richie hasn’t _just_ started to halfway get the hang of it. The more he grows up, the more he starts to feel he might not be a boy at all, and rather a great, glowing Whack-A-Mole machine, one that got legs tacked on in some Re-Animator type lab. 

(He should tell that to Missus Kelsch.)

Arie holds the phone out to him, then draws back. He’s leaning against the washing machine with his sleeves rolled up. “You’re not gonna mention the movie, yeah?” He half whispers, amicably, always amicably. 

“No,” Richie, who will never quite ascertain how to speak amicably, says back. “Well, for a price.”

For a second Arie appears to have read this as genuine. Richie doesn’t know whether to feel clever or guilty. Then the older boy’s eyebrows relax, low and fluffy, and he shoves the phone to Richie’s cheek on his brisk way out. Richie watches him go. He watches the volume bar pop up and shoot up on the TV screen through the doorway and he feels the increasingly loud synth score tickle his heels, like he’s biding time. Maybe that’s the weird, God-fighting, brink of death part of him Kelsch swears exists. The part of him that knows the second his lips meet receiver, nothing is really ever going to be alright again. 

Whatever it is, this semi-premonition, it’s not very strong. Richie watches Bill find Petrie’s throat all fake-gore slit with mild interest and then speaks after a beat. “Hey,” he says. The ten second silence that follows is not 100% alarming. His dad often does that when scolding him. Richie had elbowed a crater into his parents’ TV when he was ten and was perfecting his Ed Lover dance and his dad’s entire lecture had been, like, only a quarter talking. The rest he just pulled this odd sort of turkey face. Bottom lip curled up and forehead the color of heather; the most irritating expression Richie ever saw. Alas, he is not in trouble right now. For at the end of these ten seconds, it’s a kid’s voice that talks.

“Is this Richie speaking?” Says eleven-year-old Bobby Tozier. 

This is now 60% alarming. Like, anxiety up to around Richie’s elbows, probably, he can feel it sloshing. “Oh my God. Bobby,” Richie rolls, butt hitting the refrigerator. Bottles of milk or Coke clink under him. “You only have to say that if you haven’t spoken to whoever you’re speaking to before. Or they’re super old, but...not me. You’re all too gentlemanly and I’ll feel out of my depth. Try ‘hi asshole’.” 

Bobby’s voice is sort of creeping through the speaker, like he’s sitting a bit away from the phone. Or it’s a shitty payphone. God, that’s what this is. He’s at some rando from his cut-n-stick art class’s birthday party and all the other boys keep missing him out on pass the parcel. Probably calling from some youth centre or parish hall turned bowling alley, bought with his quarter meant for ice cream. How on earth is Richie going to pick him up? If Bobby wants picking up then he should be calling Christine. She’s the one with the car, Duran Duran bumper sticker on the back and all. Not that she’d even answer a call from home. That’s probably what had happened actually. Bobby had tried her, nothing, message after the beep, and now he’d gotten desperate and - 

“Hi asshole - I - you nee’ta come to the...the hospital.”

 _Oh_. Right, okay. 85%. Nearing neck and jaw territory. “The hospital?” Richie repeats blandly. “Shit. Sorry. I forgot, Mom’s thingy.”

He presses his cheek against the cool of the fridge and feels himself fill up to an 88 as Bobby gives a little whine. “No, Richie. It’s okay,” the kid whimpers. “You don’t have to be sorry. You should never, ever, ever be sorry.”

Richie is just now registering the feeling of being very much in someone else’s house. He doesn’t register it a lot, mostly ‘cause it feels pretty good. While the majority of people are alright being out and about but have their one, solid anchor at home, Richie operates on the reverse. Where he is alright at his place and he can sleep fine and everything but mostly he is only _home_ per se when he is somewhere interesting. Stan’s house is interesting. Only just now it feels kind of too big. Too green, too lived in. It doesn’t feel the right place at all to be having this phone call. When Richie says, “okay, I’m not sorry then. What’s going on?” his voice echoes off all the granite, and it makes him cower. Makes him feel homeless. 

Bobby just carries on whining. Richie has stopped counting his anxiety percentage, consciously at least. He surmises that makes it count as a zero. If you can’t feel something fully then you can’t feel it at all, he knows this. “What’s going on?” He says again, this time in his zero percent voice. 

“Her thingy. It wasn’t even worth it...it wasn’t even good for anything or...anything.”

Richie is reading the stickers on the Uris’ fridge when he asks, “did she die?” Foam letters: STAN L EY , A R IE, MOM, D A D. A little inappropriate for a family where nobody is below the age of sixteen, but at the same time he can’t really tell. Maybe it’s just fun. Like how old ladies sometimes have shelves of those pearly, pigtailed dolls from the forties and wear coats and skirts with little kittens on them, just as much as 5 year old girls do. Life keeps hurtling and really you’ve got to stay happy for all of it. So you stick up pink and yellow foam letters, wow, that’s how your name’d look on a Saturday cartoon title sequence. You stare at them like a wide-eyed kindergartener when you know your mom’s died. 

Bobby says, “yeah.” Richie leans out to touch the middle A of ‘Dad’ and accepts this must be a fissure point. He feels dry and not much of anything, so it must be a fissure point. Not everyone screams when their band-aid is torn, some just wash it and air it and slip their jeans back on.

(Non-metaphorically speaking, Richie is not one of these people.) 

In the case of Maggie Tozier, however, he was born one of these people. She got diagnosed as something or other on Richie’s fourteenth birthday. They were all eating carrot cake out of tupperware boxes in the hospital waiting room, it had been rammed up to the roofs. The nurse had called that time of year a ‘peak’ point for this stuff, all while staring right at the sad, crummy little candles on the lap of Richie’s shorts. The carrot cake landed them there in the first place, technically. Or technically if the technicalities in question were those of the fourteen year old brain. Mom had been having problems with eating for a solid month beforehand, like, her throat couldn’t take it. She spent all day cooking and all night retching. Not that Richie would have known at that point - “Boxes,” she’d told him a few months after the hospital, collar of her bathrobe pulled up over her lip like a mask. “That’s what you learn to do when you grow up, put things in boxes. When you feel like crying or being sick, you put it in a box, and you shove it in your closet. If you trust somebody, you can take it out and open it. But you have to put the box away again.”

Richie had pawed at the tail-end of her robe, passing it over his own face. “I’ve never seen you cry or be sick.”

“That’s right.”

“Then…” He’d pressed the fluff to his forehead. His stomach coiling one way and then the other fast. “Then okay.”

She’d probably been boxing that day, his fourteenth birthday. They’d driven her to the hospital when the carrot cake started giving her heartburn. A nurse whisked her away for what Richie misheard as and very humiliatingly declared for several weeks after was a ‘velocity’ but was actually an ‘endoscopy’. He had watched her stiff, black-brown head disappear off down a side hallway and couldn’t possibly picture the other side of it. He couldn’t picture her crying. When the nurse came back and told him and his dad and siblings it was gastro-esophageal cancer, in front of the whole waiting room, he couldn't picture her in the other room crying. It’s not like he pictured her evilly grinning with devil horns either, but. It was a definite ‘moderate’ on the green-red worrying scale. This would mark his mom’s last two years on earth and more than anything, Richie just wished he’d had a better birthday. 

He figured it might have been different if him and his mom were different. If they were like Patty and her mom, who owned matching Grease pyjamas and hiked a bimonthly Penjajawoc Preserve trail together. Not that there was really anything awful about Maggie Tozier. Nothing at all actually - she was probably by almost all global standards an alright mom, at least a B+. Her and Richie just weren’t really congruent. He knew that for real when she started chemotherapy. It made her sick, terribly. Maggie would sit in her roll back, napkin-covered chair and watch the little metal cannula dip inside her wrist just fine (“It’s like you’re a robot getting your batteries changed,” Richie had marvelled the first time) then the second they hit the parking lot she’d puke all over Richie’s Reeboks. Apparently this was normal, no matter how corpse grey she looked on the car ride home, how flat she sunk into the couch when they got there. Around the fourth or fifth barf-bath Richie had received, he was kind of starting to worry about her. This was the age at which the ultimate display of affection he could dispatch was making a fool out of himself. Well, it still is (embarrassing boy is embarrassing), but with a little more refinery. Fourteen year old Richie just thought the best way to cheer his mom up was slipping on his Comic-Con Wolverine mask and looming over her the second she lied down to watch Dallas. 

“Mom,” he’d honked, hands out in front of him. “I’ve decided. I’m going to keep you completely entertained. The only way to stop throwing up and being sad is if you don’t think about the fact you wanna throw up, or that you’re sad, right? It’s cognitive psychology. Proven.”

Maggie had blinked at him for a moment as though she was considering he might be a hallucination. Now he thinks about it, he probably easily could have been. She was so drugged up towards the end he could sometimes hear her singing to herself in bed at night. After taking him in, she dragged a hand weakly over her left eye. “Rich, I’m sick. I can’t really do this with you right now.”

“That’s the whole point! You lay back and I be prodigy son. You’re always asking why I’m...um...scribbling so much so I thought I could share, like, the wonders of my mind. My comics and jokes and stuff. Take a ride through the Richietopia Turbo Tunnel while your immune system does its thing.”

“Dallas is on. I’ll take care of you after, okay?”

“ _I_ take care of _you_ ,” said Richie, waving his notebook at her the way you wave a string at a kitten. Finding his mom still equally pallid and gleam-y eyed, he snapped his mask up and looked round to the TV set instead. “Mom, you’ve seen this one a million times.”

“I haven’t seen this.”

“You have! Last week.”

“No, I have never seen this episode in my life. I am pretty desperately trying to see it right now.”

“I watched it with you. We all watched it together. And the episode after, which makes this one totally pointless anyways ‘cause of the whole ‘it was all a dream’ thing. Pamela’s gonna see Bobby right as rain in the shower in forty five minutes’ time.”

When Richie looked back at his mom, she was staring at him properly. Weirdly. Her face twirled from vacant to angry to puppy-dog sad all in one muscular pirouette. “I have _never_ seen this,” she said, with a voice that came from low in her chest. “I cannot believe you just spoiled that for me.”

“That’s not a spoiler. Everyone knows that, seriously, you were saying how dumb it is last week…”

“All I have the strength for right now is sitting and watching these shows. For the next few days, months, I don’t know. But it’s all a dream, right, got it. I’ll find a new box set.” 

“But - !”

“You’re just going to have to get attention from someone else today, Richie. Please, please just...just be selfless. Go and find something to do.” 

This wasn’t something Richie could even be angry with his mom about, not even on the inside. Logically her reaction had been very understandable. She was sick, her head was foggy, she should have just been left alone with her thrice-watched Dallas season finale. His grand opening joke of ‘whose first name is Maggie, surname begins with T, and is an evil draconian witch? Maggie _Tozier_ of course! Just kidding!’ probably wouldn’t have gone down well anyway. But still. When Richie was sick and miserable he wanted to be utterly beguiled. His mom didn’t want anything. They were not of the same caliber. And so Richie had learned to shut her out again, all the parts of her there were to sympathize with, and indeed found something to do; scribble in his bedroom. 

Even now, in Stanley Uris’ kitchen, Richie knows if his mom were not currently dead she would still be on a different plane to him. She’d probably be upset with him for not crying, in her own quiet way. For not telling Bobby he loves him so much. “Okay Bobby, it’s okay,” he’s saying instead. “How come the hospital?”

“To get us home. You know the car’s messed. We got the city coach and now it’s t-too late, Dad checked,” squeaks Bobby. 

Lord. Dad. That’s a whole other kettle of difficult-to-deal-with fish. Richie mops his forehead with his knuckles, suddenly feeling ten years older. “Can’t, like, a nurse drive you?” He says contrarily. “Or Christine or someone? I don’t know how to do it without...you know. Kee-rash. And that would kind of be the last thing that -”

“Christine’s already here. We’re all here, we came together. Daddy got a phone call at dinner. It..it…” Bobby’s voice crackles up dry and crazy at the end. Like the vocal equivalent of a twig snap. “You were eating dinner at Stan’s.”

Richie’s face does something like a wince. The fissure point equivalent of a wince, which is just sort of wiggling your brow and popping out your teeth a bit. Induced mostly by the fact that this is going to go down in history forever. That his mom was dying and his little brother was crying all while he was explaining how he’ll cite the TV-heads in Agent USA as his main ‘creative prompt’ when he gets interviewed by Rolling Stone, cluelessly eating a macaroni Mug O’ Lunch. He was thinking only about himself. Again. 

“Well I don’t know what to do,” Richie says, as only a selfish/embarrassing boy could say to his grieving 11 year old brother. He’s feeling seriously disoriented by now. 

“Please ask Stanley for a ride?”

“I don’t think his parents are really gonna be good with him cruising all over the place. They already think I manipulate him so it’s just...I’m not really sure.”

“Richie, it’s for Mommy.”

He pulls away from the fridge, trying a little desperately to ground himself in where he is. This is Stanley’s house. His kitchen. His Aromaboy coffee machine and third grade picture pinned to the door of the utility cabinet. This is not the pit of some whirling black asteroid belt. _You are in control_ , says a voice like Rita Moreno’s in his head. “You’re right,” Richie musters, feeling he is somehow being coached and comforted here despite the fact he’s the only one on the call not sobbing. “Okay. I’m gonna ask for a ride and we’ll take everyone home.”

Bobby gives a relieved rattle. “Thanks.”

“It’s good.”

Richie hangs the phone back up, and then stares down at himself, ready to pull the single most embarrassing stunt of his life. There is no real way he can get around this. Saying it flat out - _guys, can you pause the movie? My mom just died_ \- would be mortifying; saying it with a joke - _somebody order a pizza, on me! You won’t_ believe _the shitload I’m ‘bout to inherit_ \- would be psychotic. It’s just got to be delivered in the least rehearsed way possible. Right from the pit of his empty gut. Like the time coach Black had narrowed his eyes at his doctor’s note and Richie had been left no choice but to run the mile with bowels on the verge of explosion, and when yelled at to stop stalling he’d just spat out an inertial, “if I take one more step my fucking _eyeballs_ are coming out of my _anus_!” Yeah, the Richie Tozier autopilot setting is very real. It can be at least half trusted. 

So that’s how he steps back in - or how robo-Richie does. Right at the very most disgusting peak of Society 1989. The alien-people are all mouth morphing into one another on a red-lit wide angle. Richie blindly thumps for the light switch, and Stan, Patty and Arie all whip around like circus mice. “Mom’s gone belly up,” is what robo-Richie has been programmed to say, the world semi-ending as he does. “And I really need someone to drive me to the hospital.”

Silence. Not like before, this time, it’s real silence. Equal parts processing how this could be true and how it could ever be a joke.

“Richie,” Arie says, as if this is a finished statement in itself. He makes to pause the TV but mutes it instead. This feels like it could somehow be a bridge into a more emotional conversation, and so robo-Richie dials up to second gear with an internal click. 

“Our car is screwed up so my dad got the damn bus down to the hospital. The _bus_. He would have been riding for two hours and probably contracted AIDS, like, four times now. Got to pick him and everyone up ‘cause they’re all freaking out, crying. Bobby sounded like he had some severe...super-mutated form of Bronchitis on the phone. I think Mom wasn’t meant to go yet. Not until at least Christmas time so...you know, I get it.”

More silence. This, Richie thinks, will go down as the biggest, most difficult favor he’s ever asked of his friends. Not the car, but rather just listening to him right now. Having to respond in some human way to it all. Patty unfurls her head from her legs and is the first to take a stab at it: “you get it?” She repeats gently. Of course she’s the one to prod for an elaboration. She always has kept Richie on his toes with that, always made sure if he was going to blabber and tease ‘til he was blue in the face there’d at least be some rough meaning to it all. “Do you feel like crying, too?”

Richie assumes his batteries must be dying. He’s stuck. “No, I mostly just feel weird.”

“Bad weird though?”

“That suggests possibility of a good weird. Which in turn implies something kind of dirty.”

“I’m talking about grief.”

“Can somebody please just show me some car keys?! My dad’s really gonna be pissed with me.” 

Stan, who has gone a blue sort of pale, looks to Arie as if asking for permission. A shuddered stare passes between them that seems to mean this is granted. And so they all get up, put their shoes and coats on, and disappear off into Arie Uris’ clean looking VW Polo. Off beyond the grave. 

-

Farcically enough, the car ride turns out to be the last time Richie feels anything for a good seven days. It wasn’t really a calm before the storm. The storm was already thick and black and tearing down everyone’s houses by the time his butt hit passenger seat leather, no, this was more just the last half decent shelter. Arie’s mini model tires screeched up to the hospital curb and it was raining for real. Bobby, Christine and Wentworth Tozier were all kneeling on the side. The radio played Believe It or Not as Richie rolled his window down, abysmally. In spite of all human need for dignity inside his body, his brain had let him fancy he actually was _The Greatest American Hero_ , as he called out, “geddin the back!”

“It’s been forty five minutes,” his dad shouted back. As he stood up it became oddly flagrant that he had just been sitting on the floor. Richie’s never seen him sit on the floor. If this weren’t the end of the world he might have snorted. 

“The traffic was whack, Dad. It’s raining so hard.”

Wentworth’s sleeves slipped up and Richie could see fingernail marks. That was how he’d gauge whether his mom was doing well or not, over the last two years. Fingernail marks and Chinese takeout for dinner. When her chemotherapy switched to palliative Richie was allowed to eat so many dumplings in one go he’d gotten sick for a week. His dad’s hands round the thermometer looked like they’d seen a vampire. “Help your sister up,” he was saying now as he made for a spot in the backseat. His words really should’ve been ‘help your little brother up’, seeing as Bobby was the one covered in gravel and snot in a heap, but he was traditional that way. Richie did both. Mud and rain licked through his sneakers as he took an arm from each sibling and packed them in the car like groceries. Naturally whacked the shit out of his eye while popping the door open, making everything go slightly stripy. He nursed it the whole silent way back home.

To say things were weird when he got there would be like saying Annie Lennox at the Grammys was ‘yeah, pretty alright’. (Which was something Stanley Uris actually said, by the way. Which made Richie want to die). Life got real frosty for the rest of the week. The TV was on at volume dial 30 from 9am to midnight, never a VHS or anything picked out, always just the news. Some missing kid just up the Kenduskeag and that Airbus A-3000 crash stayed on loop. Christine and Bobby did their homework together after school (new), Richie went up to his room (not new). Wentworth would pore over will papers and increasingly far out Chinese takeout menus. 

There was no actual screaming or crying. In a way stuff was calmer than it ever had been. That was what made it so weird - that life was alright, frosty like this. Nobody had to tiptoe around anymore if nothing else, and the entire upstairs no longer smelled like hospital cups and sick. No capsules to (forget to) fill in the morning and no waiting. It was alright.

(That was probably just him, though.)

(He sat in his mom’s bedroom and crawled in the bottom of her wardrobe, slipped his hands in her Dr. Scholl’s clogs from the pharmacy, and still he couldn’t feel a thing. It had just smelled funny and been too cold.)

The only times Richie could a quarter comprehend any deep sadness in this place were bedtimes. Namely Bobby’s bedtimes. 9 o’clock the night before Mom’s funeral he’d been in the bathtub, looking down at himself foggily with a loofah balanced in the crook of his neck. Looking at your body in a well-lit bathtub is somewhat a suicidal move. That is however the price you pay for having _thigh eczema_ , or one of the, like, fifty million prices. Crested somewhere between the entire locker room calling him ‘itchy Richie’ for the last six months and having to sleep in weird little cotton shorts. Richie had been trying to glare a particularly ugly sprawl of it out of existence when Bobby’s voice had drifted through the wall. 

“I don’t like going to sleep. I don’t like waking up,” it mewled, presumably to Dad. “I don’t like having the light off.”

“Well then we’ll keep the light on,” Dad’s voice replied. 

“What about going to sleep and waking up?” 

There was a creak of bedsprings. Richie all of a sudden felt a shallow pity for Bobby. Mostly because Dad sitting on the end of your bed and trying to man-talk you before sleep was more exhausting than anything that could have happened in the day. He’d sat on Richie’s once when he was twelve, passing a Furfel from hand to hand like a tennis ball, maybe what he wished it was. _Your problem, Richie, it’s that you’re just...you know...you’re just one of those guys._

“Bobby, when we have something we’re frightened of, it just means we have a bad memory. You have a memory of falling asleep and waking up that’s bad. If you want to beat it then you’ve got to make a good memory instead, try and cheer up this time around. A bit of effort.”

True to type. Dad’s route of comfort had been a lecture on classical conditioning. Of course, it wasn’t successful. A little sob surged through the wall before he’d even finished: “I don’t want to beat it. I just want m...m…” That was it for the conversation. Not for noise, as Bobby had cried and Dad had been giving strained shushes for five more minutes afterwards, but there’d been no words left to say. 

-

“You know, if a bigger boy tries to make a swing at you, I got a pretty good trick for shooing him off,” Grandpa Donnie is grunting across Maggie Tozier’s funeral wake. He’s a permanently pink-mottled and whiskery old thing, black suit making a Dracula collar around his neck. There’s a Danger Mouse print party plate in his hands. The sausage roll he has precariously balanced on the outmost flap of Danger Mouse himself’s ear is approximately two more shakes away from being Richie’s newest cleaning chore. “The second he goes for you, you pucker your lips like a lady. Just like you’re about to plant one on him. He’ll back off fast, trust me. And if he doesn’t, well, he’s probably a little bit queer, and he’s not going to do you any damage in the first place.”

Richie manages to look at his grandpa only half like he might be a slab of rotting meat. He takes the tongs from the snack table between them and offers him some strange spicy pickle, shifting his sausage roll back to safety with it. “Damn. That’s, like, the handiest form of homophobia I ever heard Grandpa. Usually it just makes everyone feel super awkward and contributes to a lot of hate crime rates but. I’ll give it to you. Decently pioneering,” he chatters. ‘Homophobia’ is not remotely within bass-fishing, homburg-wearing Grandpa Donnie’s social lexicon. Technically it’s not even in Richie’s. But, you know, he’s seen that episode of _Thirtysomething_. He also thinks he might have watched the protests in Britain on CNN when every TV show that could have been anything like _Thirtysomething_ got banned. Manchester, Newcastle, someplace musical like that. A bright blue picket sign saying ‘NEVER GOING UNDERGROUND!’ had gotten slightly burned into his brain after deciding the Jam song was his favorite a year before. But he was slightly too young to remember much else. And his mom had thought it too gritty to watch. 

( _Whose first name is Maggie, surname begins with T, and is an evil draconian witch?_ )

Grandpa waves his hand as if he has understood regardless, and has then proceeded to find it very silly. “It’s not my fault, Richard. It’s nature’s. I’d think queer fellows were just fine if God weren’t smiting them down every day like they’re not. Or if they were minding their own business, not giving my grandson any black eyes.” 

Richie isn’t even aware he has anything close to a black eye prior to this. The moment Grandpa touches on it the dark, bruise-y bulge appears right in his peripheral vision like magic. He touches his own face with a scolding sigh (again? you’re making me look stupid _again_?) and then his hair, which is waxed back atrociously for the occasion. “Okay, first of all, maybe lay off the smiting talk until you're not at a funeral. People are either going to think you’re one of those horror movie guys or...well...a maybe we should call the police-y guy. Both are a solid 6 on the believability scale. Secondly, no gay dude has ever given me a black eye, ever. You kind of just snowballed that one. I hit myself opening the car by accident.”

“I don’t know. You’re always pretty banged up, seems to me.”

“I possibly have one or two coordination related dysfunctions, but. I wouldn’t know. Medical bills, am I right?!”

“You don’t know how to fight for yourself.”

“Sure as heck doesn’t,” a new voice enters into the ring. One gelato bowl and two trays of Pogen’s gingersnaps away, a nervous-looking teenage boy is watching them. He’s midway through snapping one of the aforementioned gingersnaps on his palm (the right way to eat it, Richie’s subconscious approves) and randomly has a green-and-yellow bow tie fastened onto his all black suit. He has one of those faces. Not one of those faces in the way Wentworth Tozier means when he says _one of those guys_ , but rather one of those faces that lives in you. You remember it from a while back or you’re gonna start remembering it from now; a perdurable face. “This one couldn’t fend off a kitten, I’m saying.”

Grandpa turns to look at this new addition the second his little wooden fork meets pickle. He thinks everyone he’s never seen before is an alien. It isn’t really often you see a new guy here, in all fairness. Maybe if you’re by the lakes or the beach rock & crystal stores in the summer, or in a few months’ time when Derry gets its first Starbucks. But not Richie Tozier’s funeral-decorated living room. Not ever. That’s like seeing Madonna buying her Chicko Stix down at the Derry Hannafords. “And what’s this about, Richie?” Old Donnie says with a husky sniff. 

Richie takes in the stranger beyond his cookie eating methods. He looks like a hairier, more pint-sized version of Ash from Evil Dead and is shaking slightly. “I literally haven’t got the slightest -”

“I’m the gay guy that gave him that black eye. And I’m just saying I agree,” the stranger goes on, resting his hands on the paisley tablecloth. Something in this cocky-nervousness digs at Richie’s brain a bit harder than _one of those faces_. Like, _I know exactly who you are_ hard. Oh - right - it’s Eddie Kaspbrak. He plays on the hockey team at school and famously sleepwalked himself halfway across Washington D.C. on the eighth grade field trip. He’d snored past Thomas Jefferson and everything. When he woke up he’d been so freaked out that, legend has it, he’d crashed right out again, and the whole trip ended early with no refunds ‘cause Mr. Pinson had to take him to the ER. This is going to make things approximately six times worse. As in the fact Eddie is present at all, rather than his sleepwalking escapades. He just so happens to have been Richie’s best friend through ages eight to thirteen, until they’d had a very puerile, top-secret fall out. And now he’s masquerading as a homosexual ruffian at Richie’s mom’s funeral three years later. Not exactly a Simon & Garfunkel reunion.

(Which was actually super boring by the way. Wentworth had a tape of their NYC comeback and made Richie watch it with him at Christmas; “Pop, this music is so totally _you_ ,” was the closest thing to an insult he could have ever gotten away with.) 

Alas, Eddie’s presence seems to have a somewhat desirable effect on the Grandpa Donnie situation. The old man stiffens slightly. He sets his fork down on his plate like he’s found a hair on it and gives Eddie a blazing look. “You ought to keep to yourself, young man,” he grumbles. “There’s enough death around this place.” 

“I’m not trying to _kill_ him. I’m just trying to kick his ass, you see. I knew this would be the place to...um…” Eddie looks to the large posterboard with Maggie Tozier’s face on it at his elbow with a faint wince. “Find him.”

“You don’t look very tough.” 

“I am. All guys like us are, really. You’ve never seen Freebie & The Bean?”

Richie has. It’d ruffled him in ways he isn’t fully able to access yet. Grandpa, however, has not paid attention to any movies that came out since before the colored ones did. He seems to have assumed Eddie is speaking a kind of code, therefore paling. “Right. Well,” he says, drawing Danger Mouse into his belly, and then instead of finishing, doddering off to the couch. Richie watches him bump directly into three different aunts instead of honing in on Eddie’s there-ness just yet. Catastrophically, he is feeling sort of _shy_. He hasn’t felt shy since he fell off the coin-operated cowboy ride at the mall when he was nine (and was trying to pull his best Gregory Peck pose no-handed) and his mom had to pull his shorts down in front of everybody to scout for injuries. She did a lot of things like that. Things that were purportedly nurturing and attentive but made you feel like rotting fruit at the same time.

Nettled by the memory, Richie whips his head around. Eddie is taking an unassuming sniff of the gelato spoon. He’s got this squirrely, pinchy sort of look while doing so that all of a sudden makes Richie spiteful. “Fuckin’ aye,” is what he says. “First my mom’s dead and now my grandpa thinks I’m caught up in some kind of...gay...war. Stellar body count, hairdog. Haven’t seen you in a dick year and the one event worth crawling out of your hole to threaten me in front of my family members like a loan shark for is a funeral. I’ve been holding up fine thanks. And you?” 

Considering this is the most garbled, senseless wisecrack Richie’s had the shame of putting his name to, Eddie seems to follow pretty well. First he irritatedly furrows his eyebrows (expected) and then he gives a slight snort (not). “One of those things is definitely not my fault. Also, hairdog? I never had a mullet in my life.”

Richie crams another spoon into the gelato bowl and takes some for himself. “Yeah, well. You’ve definitely got something. You grew your hair out. You look like Mormon Patrick Swayze.” 

“I’m Jewish but that’s actually kind of sweet.” 

“If you have a horrible sinus infection maybe.”

“Are you actually holding up fine then? Cuz right now you seem really angry and sad.” 

There is a general sense of Eddie being in the lead here. He’s the one to have Knight-in-armor rescued Richie from his crazy grandpa and now he’s the one who gets to gently ask, _are ya doing okay, Rich_? If this were one of those awful PSA commercials Richie would be the puking, purple-eyed junkie mom and Eddie would be the poor college boy son who holds her hair back and says into the camera, _would you leave this to your kid_? Something in Richie assures this is because he is the son of the deceased, and not because he is a giant pussy, so he’s spurred on to dodge, “I’m good. If not slightly appalled by that caricature you just pulled. I wasn’t sure if when people said grief shows itself in funny ways that wildly offensive gay guy impersonations fell under the umbrella, but, you know. I feel pretty clear now.”

Eddie’s magical mystery tour of every facial expression biologically achievable now lands on an icked-out look. He puts his hands in his pockets. “Well jeez-um fuck, Richie, it was meant to be a favor. You’re free from your gramps and your gramps is free from...AIDS I guess.” 

“So brainy, Reagan.” 

“The world’s view. Not mine. And anyways, it wasn’t an impersonation.”

Richie frowns over the top of the ladle meant for everyone’s use currently shoved in his mouth. Eddie returns it, only slightly more embarrassed. Which slaps Richie awake to the fact he currently looks like he is disgusted, as opposed to like he is recalibrating. His mind shows him an odd, brief flash of Eddie rolling his Little Folks’ western pants up to play in the stream when they were both ten years old and there being a few hairs there for the first time. It plays like a broadcast interruption. Then Richie blinks it off, and registers he has no decent response to Eddie’s gay-ness. He only has something completely idiotic: “well I hope you’re not gonna Freebie & The Bean me for real, then.” 

Eddie snorts through it. Richie supposes amidst his deep cringe that guys like Eddie just kind of have to. Just like how he buys himself Ipana toothpaste so he can hold up Bucky Beaver’s printed face against his own and say to Christine, ‘uncanny or what?!’ whenever he brushes. Somehow that makes it hurt less the next time somebody else makes the comparison. “You got thick walls in this house,” Eddie says randomly.

“Um. Thanks.”

“You wanna smoke some pot?” He goes on, patting his suit pocket. This sequence of events is becoming so bizarre that Richie considers he might still be talking to his grandpa, who has gone on to explain the five methods of fishing ( _there’s your bait fishing, your fly-fishing, your whatever-the-fuck_...) in such a flat tone that he’s fallen asleep on the pickle dish. Natheless, the sheer smell now zoinking out of Eddie’s jacket is one hundred percent real. And so Richie hangs his bottom lip open like a dog and says, “let’s go to my room.” 

Richie hasn’t tidied said bedroom in over two weeks (approximately three days left until Dad is gonna start caring about that stuff again), but his philosophy is that this is a prime setup for guests. Especially guests like Eddie. He’s not exactly _meant_ to be here after all, so to Richie there is something slightly uncomfortable about things looking like he is. He strides through all the dirty pyjama shirts and Black Cat Gum wrappers and flops himself on the bed like he’s alone. “I’m not really into pot or anything. In the way some people are into pot, I mean. If someone asked me if I smoked I’m still at the point where I’d instinctually say no,” Eddie witters behind him, closing the door. “Mostly it’s just the only thing that stops my fuckin’ nerves.” 

“Who the hell gets it for you?” Richie says in his best disinterested tone. He’s been trying to get Arie to tell him how one goes about buying these substances for months only to be told _now now, buckjumper, ya gotta earn it - and also be eighteen_ every time. 

“Bill Denbrough, mostly. But sometimes someone just has it after a game. Hockey game.”

“Bill Denbrough does not buy your bud. He couldn’t budget a steady flow of anything good like that around his hair-gel nest egg, surely.”

Eddie gives an angry little purr, standing on his tiptoes in Richie’s peripheral to get the window open. He’s apparently taken his bowtie off. He somehow resultantly looks much smaller. “Dippity-Do, Richie. He uses a jar of Dippity-Do. It’s cheap as shit,” he sighs. The breeze hits his face as the pane flips upwards and the room turns momentarily milky. “I never said this stuff was _good_ either.” 

“Oh. You dragged me away from the grave for second-rate stuff, okay,” Richie says reproachfully.

“It’s strong at least. Also wasn’t it a cremation?” 

“How strong?”

Richie looks up to see Eddie shrugging while trying to roll a joint one-handed, face all screwed up like he’s working on a car. He looks like something out of _Cheech & Chong’s Next Movie_ only if its set schedules got tossed up with _Revenge of the Nerds_ and Hollywood had just let it all bleed into one goofy nightmare ride. “Strong enough to knock you over. If I let you take this whole thing for yourself you also wouldn’t be able to watch cartoons until you weren’t high anymore, for safety reasons - especially not Chip ‘n’ Dale” he yaps, weed under his fingernails. The joint is finished with a rough slam of hand against windowsill. Richie kicks himself up to join him at last. 

“I feel like if you’re going to take something to help you with nerves it most likely shouldn’t be something that obliterates all mental faculties. You can just get the Melanoma that tastes like candy from Kroger.”

“Melatonin. And no, trust me. It needs to be strong for my nerves. Otherwise I would probably have shit myself at school three times by now.”

Richie stands properly next to Eddie for the first time today, and notes that it sort of feels like someone invisible has told him to, like this is not a window out onto the mailboxes and autumnal garden gnomes of sleepy Moose Drive but a stage out to the hungry masses. _Mr. Tozier to upstage left, I said left - left, God damn it_. They’re like Chevy Chase and Dennis Miller on Saturday Night Live, Sonny and Cher on David Letterman. Richie is definitely Chevy and Eddie is definitely Dennis but he can’t work out the second one. He’d like to think he’s Sonny, only it’s Cher who forgets the words. Oh God. He’s totally a Cher. “Shit yourself?” Richie pushes through this horror. “What, as in literally?”

Eddie pulls a Clipper out of his pocket, and manages to manoeuvre it smoothly for once. He lights his joint with an earnest look. “Dude, all I’m saying is it’s jackpot for my team that I’m the master of silent but deadlies. Ice rink echoes like a _bitch_.”

This would probably have made Richie laugh if it weren’t backdropped by hockey boy camaraderie, or if Eddie had said it fifteen minutes later once they'd both had their fair share of tokes. Richie’s a big believer that even the most gut-wrinkling joke can be made unfunny by sports. Also the notion that it’s actually a joke between others, and it’s just being cracked at you for now because, hey, you’re the host of this funeral, but that is more the law of embarrassing boy and less of comedy generally. “Must not be so great for them that you’re here today though. Your hockey buddies, I mean. I figured you must be missing out on a really good riding around in back of wood-panel station wagon drinking Coors sesh-o,” Richie says all in one breath. “There’s a leather seat currently covered in Christie Mini crumbs and dust, right where your sweet ass should be. Right?”

It’s only now you can see that Eddie had previously been coming out of his shell. He’s swiftly reversing back in. “Right. Yeah, totally. Was hard to find time between all my other funerals today, but…”

“You’re owning that too hard, man.”

“That one’s actually not a joke. I genuinely went to another funeral this morning. Didn’t you see they found that Kenduskeag kid all mauled up like a bear got him?”

“Jesus fucking Christ.”

Richie takes the joint awkwardly. He holds it like how you’re meant to hold lipgloss. On his first go, he doesn’t really breathe anything in, ‘cause he’d fallen for a feature in his sister’s _Tiger Beat_ copy implying smoking weed is really ‘just all about the hot flavor’ six weeks prior. (He reads _Tiger Beat_ because the best way to learn about the female species is from the inside, where no other guys dare set foot. Also because the Richard Grieco cover edition had been oddly hypnotic when he was twelve. The shared name but woeful mismatch in attractiveness had sent Richie into some jealous mania.) “In all seriousness though, or whatever,” Eddie says, paradoxically, as Richie tries to work out what is remotely hot about the flavor of weed. “I don’t actually mean to pop up out of the blue. I know it’s not...um...the best time for me to do that so I’m sorry. It’s just that your dad invited me here, on the phone.” 

Richie turns to look at him with a childishly furrowed brow. Even worse, this makes him look a lot like said dad. “Wuh-huh?”

“Yeah. Last week. He said he was reluctant to ask any of your friends over for it because there was a whole I-don’t-know-what going on but if I wanted to come I could.”

“He wouldn’t have said I-don’t-know-what,” Richie notes.

“Well...if you wanna know the _ins and outs_ of the whole call, sure. Just something about you spending too much time with your friends when him and, um, your mom needed you for stuff. And also that you fucked up his car hanging around with them so getting to the hospital was hard.” 

“You might have to spot this next month’s phone bill.”

“It really wasn’t a long discussion. He just said that and then that I should come to the funeral, ‘cause I spent a lot of time with Maggie. When we hung out before.”

This suggestion is both annoying and slightly funny. Maggie had poured Eddie Lipton’s Alligator Soup from a can a few times when he came to watch TV after school and sometimes called him _Zeddie_ for no reason in particular. She also showed him how to pull a tick out of your own neck with tweezers following a semi-casualty playing down in the woods. That, however, was very much the curtailment of their relationship. Just the same as it was with Stanley, Patty, even Beverly Marsh from school band. Richie’s dad has a habit of putting all the worst and or most underwhelming things in his life on pedestals. From his ability to grow a bright orange curly moustache since age 13, to his staggering likeness to his grandpa, to Eddie Kaspbrak being his best friend. Even more annoyingly, Richie is kind of _disappointed_. For reasons he can’t articulate he’d been hoping Eddie had just jolted awake like a Darda Buggy this morning, full of regret and need to reparate, tortured by the knowledge he ever let precious Richie Tozier go. 

The psychological somersault of it kicks him halfway into autopilot mode again. He passes the joint back to Eddie’s hands. Eddie gives him a judging look, which is really very due after his pathetic excuse for a toke. “Well. Even if you are here under knifepoint, Swayze, you’re still allowed to have fun. I could probably Mr. Miyagi you into doing that. We could practice playing Sudz and laughing at jokes. I’m your old pal, after all, some say catching up with old pals is a pleasant, even comfortable experience,” Richie blathers. 

“I’m hardly dying to get away from you, Richie,” Eddie says, horrifically. “I let you smoke my weed.”

“You didn’t even take your shoes off.”

“That’s cuz there’s Beanee Weenie dried into your carpet. And also because you are the one who can’t stop being mega rude to me since you saw me.” 

Richie blinks and a cloud of pot hits his cheeks. It is pretty commonplace for him to be called rude and instructed to stop being as such, but once again, he is abnormally offended. “No rudeness here. This is just how I operate, you know, like how we’re all in different corners of the box of normal or...uh, the branch of...whatever it’s called. I’m not in your corner, so ostensibly it seems to be the wrong one, but really I’m just doing my own thing and I’m perfectly worthy and tolerable that way.”

Eddie raises his eyebrows, whether out of humor or annoyance or a confusing lump of the both left unclear. He leans to put the joint back in Richie’s hands but at the last minute his elbow seems to go Buckin’ Bronco and he clumsily puts it straight in Richie’s mouth instead. “Breathe in and keep it there, for God’s sake,” he squeaks. “I don’t know who taught you that thing about the normal box but you’re using it wrong. That doesn’t mean you can be a dick. That just means you can...I don’t know...click your heels when you walk or call Punky Brewster your favorite show or something.” 

Richie’s eyes blip out as the back of his throat explodes. Oh, fuck. The writers for Tiger Beat should all be shot. He flicks Eddie’s hand away so he can wheeze. “Punky Brewster is - ACK - actually okay if you watch it ironically. The one where her and Cherie almost get made to snort coke is a real - real trip.” 

“Each to their own. Did it go in your lungs?”

“Yeah, went in my lungs. Several other organs too, possibly,” Richie chokes, taking a last suckle and then launching himself off onto the carpet. His tongue now tastes like sweat and spoilt grapefruit and his head is getting sore. “It was the guidance counselor, with the normal box. She has a poster about it with pictures of the Snorks on.”

“You see Miss Kelsch?”

“Every Monday. Only she’s a missus now. Her husband looks like a proboscis monkey but if you say they look like a sweet couple on her desk picture she’s way more likely to slip you some gum with your reason for absence note, so. If she ever asks he’s Kurt Russell.” 

Eddie stubs the joint out on the outside part of the sill. He looms over Richie for a moment, probably thinking something condemnatory about him, before kneeling on the only clean patch of rug. There’s a distinctively _boyish_ look about him doing this move. Although Richie notices that about most guys, that they look very boyish in a way he never could. Not that he himself looks super girly. He was built the same as them all. There’s just a sense that what had happened after the building, the growing maybe, had veered off for him somehow. Feeling achy and woozy as he is in this moment, Richie may have some sort of proclivity to consider why exactly this is, and whether it makes him happy or sad. But the thought lets itself go the second he’s distracted again. “We should play a get-to-know-me game. So that we understand each other as teenagers more,” Eddie proposes abruptly. 

Richie, who is now apparently laying on his back, turns his head with minor difficulty. “Like twister?”

“What? No. Like twenty questions or something. For example...um...what’s your favorite food?”

“Probably the taco pizza at Pizza Hut.”

“Cool. Now you ask me mine.”

“Ask you your what?”

Eddie gives a long sigh, but it doesn’t come with its usual, spiky growl that Richie’s just now randomly remembered. He’s sitting slumped against the side of the bed. “Honestly Richie, you got about one hit off that thing and about thirty five seconds ago. I mean my favorite food, fuckin’ obviously. It’s chicken wings. What’s your favorite movie?”

“Oh. No, no, pass.”

“Pass? On favorite movie?!”

“Yes. Respect my boundaries. Why don’t we play the ‘do you still’ game instead, seeing as I already have, like, base knowledge?” 

“Um, well,” Eddie says in his best I-hate-you-but-that’s-a-solid-idea voice. “Okay. We can play whatever game your _boundaries_ want then.” 

Richie props himself half up on his elbows. He makes a camera frame with his fingers which he thinks he’s holding close to his own eyes but is actually bopping Eddie square in the face. This makes it all feel like some strange, costume-less cabaret act. “Do you still…” he trails off, holding his hand above his head theatrically. He pictures it glowing in one of those light-up Michael Jackson gloves. “Do you still conk out all the time? I remember you used to sleep in class. Even Mr. Sauver’s class, which seems like it should warrant a psych ward referral.”

Eddie pushes his Mormon Patrick Swayze hair out of his face, taking yet more annoyance in this question but trying to pretend he doesn’t. Which somehow feels more like a rejection to Richie than a fully wanton sneer. “Less conking out and more type 1 Narcolepsy, but yes. I went to the docs about it this year only it was kind of a nightmare ‘cause everyone around here knows about, um, my sexual identity and that stuff and at the doctors they practically wear spacesuits if they think you’re gonna give them AIDS. As if any bodily fluids are coming out of me to talk about sleep problems,” he clacks. “I guess I could fall asleep and accidentally drool on their desk, but. The ‘Can We Talk’ brochures all say drool doesn’t even count. That’s why guys are still allowed to kiss. Anyways, managed to get diagnosed through all the tarp. Type 1 Narcolepsy. Yes. Still going.”

Richie could probably not assimilate this at the best of times. The slight pins and needles in his fingers is throbbing in time with Eddie’s crazy inflection and it’s making it all much more comical than it is. “Type one narc…”

“Narcolepsy. It’s where I go into REM sleep way too fast and irregularly.” 

“REM. Like, as in, that’s me in the corner, that’s me in the spotlight -“

“Do _not_ sing. It means deep sleep, basically, I sleep too deep too fast and I sleep really spontaneously. My immune system screwed up, lost me all the brain cells that take care of that stuff,” Eddie goes on, surprisingly patient. He narrows his eyes at Richie’s still-levitating hand currently tracing the shape of his name on the ceiling. “My turn though. Do you still dress up all the time?”

Richie drops his hand rapidly. Naturally, Eddie has picked one of the three things he was gravely hoping would have been forgotten over the last three years. Flanked by that time he got chronic duck itch from playing popsicle in the quarry and that other time he’d turned very seriously to Eddie on his tenth birthday sleepover to run by him at midnight, _boys aren’t meant to get titties, right? Cuz if they are I really don’t think mine are coming_. “What the shit are you talking about, Eds?” He says, wisely feigning ignorance and foolishly availing himself of the old nickname. 

Eddie, reptilian as ever, doesn’t even blink. “You know, when you used to dress up and make your mom buy you party store wigs for Christmas. What’s that one character you used to play as and thought was, like, the most amazing fucking thing ever...Lula? Lulu. Lulu the cat. Christine had that bubble skirt with the cheetah print on and you just went insane.”

“No. I do _not_ dress up as Lulu the cat anymore. Do _you_ eat mushy banana for breakfast and use a binky when you go to bed?”

“Sure don’t, Lu. Also that counts as a round.”

“The fuck it doesn’t. That was purely illustrative.” 

“Is Kerri Green still your top celebrity crush? You know, the girl from Goonies.” 

Richie can’t tell if Eddie intentionally is trying to be disorienting or if he just can’t handle the world’s most pitifully small intake of marijuana. He doesn’t know who Kerri Green played in Goonies for the life of him just now and Lulu the cat is a dizzy, distant horror story. Alas, as he tends to with all slightly gushy and romance-adjacent topics, he just says, “sure.” 

Eddie gives a little guffaw at that. “One trick pony. I figured now you’d like those more spunky-punky girls like Chrissie Hynde or Annie Lennox dressed up as Elvis or something.” 

“I like those now too, obviously,” he says as he gains a little more zest for the conversation. “Although they’re more cool than mega hot, you know. I’d wanna marry Kerri Green and take her to the epcot centre for honeymoon, put my arm round her on the spaceship earth ride, but Chrissie Hynde I’d so make out with on the weekends.” 

“Ah, I see. Very tactical.”

“Pretty much. I guess it’s safe to say you’re not still into Bo Derek.”

“No, no. I find her activism to be very important though.”

Eddie is now laying down too. He might have been for a little while but Richie’s brain has only just decided to cognize the warmth of it. His feet are level with Richie’s head. Shod in wrestling shoes that would make most people think of Matthew Modine in Vision Quest but makes Richie think of Bananarama’s Cruel Summer. “Do gay dudes get crushes on celebrities?” He thinks aloud. A sleepy snort sounds from the other end of Eddie’s sprawling body. The weed must be steaming the shit out of him by now too. 

“Yeah, Richie,” comes thickly after the snort. “We get loads. I like Ken Olin and Dennis Quaid if you’re asking. But mostly I just...you know. Mainly I just…”

“Pause a second. Are you about to traumatize me?”

“No. Your brain’s too gunked up already, I don’t think it could fit anything else. I was just going to say that I have a semi-boyfriend in real life so I don’t really think about movie guys as much anymore.” 

Richie sits bolt upright in slow motion, which is probably the weirdest sensation ever. Knowing a dude who has a boyfriend is so far beyond uncharted territory for him it kind of makes him panic. At this point in his personal growth and perception of things he might as well have just befriended a Martian. “ _You_ have a _boyfriend_? He’s real? And he lives in Derry and you’ve met with him in the last twelve months?!” He exclaims. 

Eddie blinks up at him like a dog, slack-faced. “Yes he’s fucking real, thank you. He’s just...um, okay, well he’s not fully my _boyfriend_ -boyfriend yet, per se,” he says with his hands draped over his temples. 

“Right. So not real then, as I thought.”

“He goes to our school, asshole, I’m telling you he’s real. It’s just not labelled. More that I like him and there’s a seventy eight to seventy nine percent chance he likes me back, so. We have some unsung thing.” 

“What’s his name?” Richie says as casually as possible. He’s getting another premonition right now, although it’s maybe not a premonition, as it isn’t half as potent before. Just a very strange and twitchy reverie where Eddie turns to look ruefully at the window and whispers, _it’s you, Richie, it’s been you since the start_ , and then a tear rolls down his cheek, and Richie has to explain that he’s so touched but he just doesn’t swing that way and it all becomes an afterschool special-ified version of the Children’s Hour. 

Then Eddie says, “Adam Weisshart. You know, the guy that always does the gospel readings in assembly. He has the right voice for it,” and the melodrama is suspended. Richie’s soupy brain can only manage to recall Adam Weisshart’s haircut and the slope of his shoulders but he has a feeling even if he were bright-eyed and bushy-tailed this would still be about all he knew. This makes him a rather underwhelming party in a forbidden gay love story, in Richie’s eyes. He makes a sort of ‘zouf’ noise, which is originally meant to be a riff on this, but is cut short by a soft snore. Richie cranes his neck to see Eddie’s eyes are now closed. He’s fallen asleep, with a smile on his face. 

-

Monday afternoons are for Missus Kelsch’s off-brand Bubble Yum, sinking your ass three feet into a beanbag and pretending you have communicable feelings. Richie doesn’t _really_ mind it. It’s kind of one of the best parts of the week. He just feels like the only types to openly enjoy what is to all intents and purposes therapy are lonely arty-farty housewives with Jane Fonda tapes of their own and, you know, actual crazy people. And also like he is technically not someone who should be in therapy at all. When his mom first got diagnosed word travelled so fast that it was practically in his school record before his dad dropped him home from the hospital. He’d had a principal meeting before his first class afterwards and from that point on it had all been his own fault. (“Now, Mr. Tozier, we want to help you, so we need you to help us too. You’ve had your fair share of problems. Just because there’s a lot going on at home right now it will not count as an excuse to act out.”

“Aye-aye captain. Do the voices in my head count instead?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You know, the voices. The ones that sound like they’re out of the Exorcist and go all _must...tell...Principal O’Pray...his chin looks like a...big vagina_.”) 

His teachers had done nothing for the next year apart from be slightly awkward when dealing with him. Then in ‘91 came the counselling after he missed four of his end of year exams for Maggie’s stent fitting. (A whole day of watching his mom puke and eat applesauce with an oxygen mask that made her snore while awake was so not worth the trouble, Richie almost seriously missed his _Death of a Salesman_ flashcards). Christine said it was typical school only cared about your pain if your pain leaked through onto your report card. Dad said they should have just minded their own business. So, to cut a long, sissy ass story short, Richie tells people he hates going to these things. It’s probably true he doesn’t take advantage of them the way he’s meant to. But even at sixteen he is planetary enough to know the guidance counsellors of rural Derry Maine high school can only take him so far. Not quite, however, enough to know whether that’s on him or them.

Missus Kelsch takes a pretty good stab at it. She’s a friendly-looking chick, ‘wholesome’ as Richie’s mom would have said. Only his sister and Olivia Newton-John in Two of a Kind have thus far officially taken the title. Kelsch seems to have the haircut for it. She leans her chin on her pink ice ringed fingers and proposes this afternoon, “a lot of the time, when it appears we feel nothing it means we actually feel everything. It’s too much to sort through at that moment so your body keeps it on ice, somewhere hidden. What do you think about that?”

Richie chugs down a quarter of his Pop a Rouge and sinks back into his beanbag. He’s wearing this stupid itchy Button Your Fly shirt. Something that has already been a source of deep regret this morning, as one of the older boys had pointed out while he was clearing the moldy lunch tidbits out of his locker that you couldn’t wear a Button Your Fly shirt without the matching jeans, or you just looked scatty. Even worse, the jeans he _did_ have on were not buttoned at the fly at all. “I don’t know,” he says candidly, swilling his drink around. “I think the beef is primarily just that it was all expected. Been talking to you about her dying for ages, you know, so her then actually dying isn’t exactly, um, _Empire Strikes Back_ or anything. Plus I’ve just got so many other things to think about. My beautiful and brilliant girlfriend, the upcoming football season -“

“You said Bobby’s been crying a lot. Wasn’t he there when you first found out your mom was terminal?” Missus Kelsch cuts in. Her lips are pursed but her frustration is never really a threat to Richie. It’s a helpful frustration, one that he’s not really able to apprehend. His mom or dad wouldn’t purse their lips at him when scolding him for ruining things and in his head this makes the two experiences paranormally different. 

“Yeah but he was little. And he cries whenever he hears hip-hop music, too. He says sometimes he gets convinced Mike D is really mad at him.” 

“So you yourself were old enough and ok to process it? You felt a lot of things back then?” 

Richie wriggles his eyebrows at her. This means he’s been beat, but he doesn’t want to get all woolly about it. He crushes his now empty Pop A Rouge bottle to slip in his backpack and pretends like his stomach isn’t gurgling wildly. “You didn’t,” Kelsch tries to finish for him, at the same time as Richie says, “it was my birthday.”

“It was,” she says a little distantly. “Well, it is. I think you might think it’s still your birthday right now Richie. As in, you can’t move on from then. Brain-wise.”

He’s heard this kind of talk before on dinnertime soaps and the like. His sister would probably watch something like that, about the sixteen year old who still wears diapers, who still cries for his mom to change ‘em at night even though she’s long been brutally slain. This is partly disturbing, but he quashes it with the idea that it means Missus Kelsch most likely just heard it on TV too. Probably a Simon & Simon case that made her say, _hey, I read about that!_ to her husband on the couch and harvest it to eventually fling on poor Richie Tozier at first chance. “I’m telling you now I don’t think that,” poor Richie Tozier himself says. 

Kelsch holds her delicate fingers up, shaking her head. A move to say ‘you’re perfectly entitled to that opinion, but…’ “It wouldn’t be conscious and it wouldn’t be on purpose. Sometimes we just get stunted.”

“I’m literally not stunted.”

“You haven’t felt anything about your mother since you were fourteen and her funeral was yesterday.”

“What can I say, I’m a guy. We’re creatures of stoicism.”

“No, Richie. You are stunted,” she sighs, purple pen now slipped into her right hand. She’s scribbling down on his class absence card but Richie daydreams for a moment she’s signing him off to some medieval mental asylum. _Administer with sixty electroshocks a day. Bump to 80 if he gives you mouth. Assuredly this will teach him how to cry, and possibly even function as a human being. If all else fails then fish out the lobotomy waitlist_. “Either that or you’re a sociopath, from my knowledge. So if I were you I think I’d like the first one best.”

He takes his card while unwittingly looking a little miserable. “I feel like sociopath would get me cut way more slack. Might actually get some kind of workplace benefit for it,” he mutters.

“Well, if I remember rightly, you haven’t got a day job.”

“I told you! I put an app in at the nursing home. I walked in there and everything, I wore a snappy little blue tie.”

“Six months ago, allegedly. Most _sixteen year olds_ would probably not be beating around the bush with this kind of thing,” Missus Kelsch says, wearing a small smile now. “I’m sure your dad would always be happy for some help at his surgery if you really don’t want anything else.”

Richie suppresses a hyena cackle. His dad would be eighty dick miles away from grateful. The last time the two of them collaborated on any dental related topic was Went campaigning for him to get a gingivectomy as his eighteenth birthday present and Richie promptly going into hyper-sensitive meltdown mode. (“I’m offering you something helpful, Richard. You’re my kid. Of course I want to help you make the right decisions.”

“If _plastic surgery_ is my right decision I’m just going to kill myself. I’m gonna literally cut my fucking throat up.”

“It’s a medical procedure.”

“Oh, that’s meant to make it better? I’m so ugly it’s _clinical_?!”) Now he can’t pick shit out of his teeth after without hating himself a bit. In all candor, he may have forgotten he never could. Safe to say the topic is a wobbly one. “Somebody would probably end up getting their jaw severed. Would all end up looking like a scene from _Maniac_ , which is actually an awesome movie and one I’d love to take part in some kind of remake of someday but if it’s gonna be on the surgery CCTV then professedly it’d be more of a snuff,” he prattles.

“If you’re not working then you’ve got to keep yourself busy somehow. Have you? Been keeping yourself busy? Something safe, I hope, nothing to do with that black eye.”

“It’s from the car. And aside from the aforementioned football and potential modelling gig Stiggs & Fudge-Dog is real slow going. Making a masterpiece takes a lot of grit.”

“Oh, your picture book?”

“Comic,” Richie corrects almost mechanically. “Or graphic novel if you’re a New Yorker. I pretty much finished the storyboard now but I’m iffy on the ending ‘cause I can’t work out which of them’s gonna die, the main characters. I always thought it was gonna be Fudge-Dog but after everything I’ve put him through I feel it’s shitty payoff. Might make Stiggs self-sacrifice.”

Kelsch raises her eyebrows the exact same way Richie pictures she had at her Simon & Simon lightbulb. It’s an ‘ah, I can use that!’ sort of expression. Which is never a good expression for your kind-of-therapist to wear. Especially not after talking about something innocuous as your sci-fi adventure cat-themed comic in the making, ‘cause if even that comes out fucked up and sad then you probably have a problem. “Check your language. You didn’t tell me any of the characters died,” she says softly. 

“Last time you asked Stiggs was still called Zoink. Creative process is an ever-changing current, Frau Kay.”

“And when did this specific change come about?”

This suggestion is so on the nose yet so epically missing the mark that Richie almost hears an audience reaction. He’s back on Saturday Night Live and the big, guffawing dudes in the back of the crowd can barely hold it in. “Ages ago,” he says pointedly. “If anything it was that kid dying that did it. Arthur..Artie…”

A grave little clack comes from Kelsch’s desk. “Arthur Janecki? The one they found at the weekend?”

“No, the one from last month. Arthur Hendricks. The kid that died in the tunnel, I was thinking about it.”

Missus Kelsch is now working on a gym excuse note, without even being asked, which is a major score. She’s technically not meant to do this at all without Richie A) tossing his cookies in her lap B) passing out in her lap or C) breaking down crying in her lap, but he figures loss of mother may count as an ‘all of the above’. He nearly labels this a stroke as luck in his head. Gym class is on the swimming portion of the semester which is incontrovertibly the longest and worst and during last week’s class Richie had embarrassed himself royally. An incident involving the diveboard and a lime green pool noodle. That’s all the need-to-know. Then he realises Maggie Tozier dying getting whittled down to a lucky fifth period bunk off is possibly the most fucked up notion of the century, and so starts thinking about what he’ll have for lunch instead. “There’s a lot of death around here, these days,” Kelsch says in an ironically sugary voice, reminding Richie for a moment of his grandpa and Eddie Kaspbrak. She passes over his final note and nods her head to the door. “Keep on coping.”


	2. Since Mom

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning for implications of self harm, negative body image, references to racism, and uneducated/period typical vocab around gay + trans people

Richie doesn’t fall asleep the whole night on Friday, pathetically, something he’s never been able to achieve before even when he’s _wanted_ to. He’d been drawing until one in the morning (a tangential, rather self-indulgent sketch of Stiggs on the ledge of a Martian volcano for his grand sacrifice. He even skimmed an article about Mt. St Helen’s for accuracy. Reading about all the ash kind of gave him a cough). Then he’d played one game of Congo Bongo with his pillow over his speaker. _Then_ he’d seen that it was three in the morning and felt hardcore, and so figured he’d just ride it out. The next four hours were spent digging at his eczema like a dog in front of the mirror and listening to a little T. Rex. A totally normal teenage thing to do. No cause for Missus Kelsch referral, fatherly disappointment, nothing. Richie just wasn’t zonked. 

By the time Cosmic Dancer came on he could smell bacon downstairs. He remembers Eddie Kaspbrak had some weird theory about smelling bacon in the morning when they were kids, that, like, it was a sign you grew up okay. Privileged kids associate morning with bacon and broken kids with mildew and dirty laundry. 

(“Which one are you?”

Eddie stood up on top of the rockpile they played at, looking like a toy soldier. Braver back then, in some ways, frailer in others. “I am a _hellfire!_ ” he squalled.)

He’d scratched his legs halfway raw by that point. Which sounds really dark. But is actually very much human instinct when there is ugly, dry flesh-tape all over you from the butt down that doesn’t go away no matter how much of your sister’s Noxzema you lather on it. (He had half dreamed Rebecca Gayheart’s face off the bottle would appear out of his thigh like something from the Society 1989 finale scene. So perhaps this result could be read as a relief.) Plus it’s a good way to refrain from any scratching off any other body parts. Or at least just getting really depressed over them. Before the eczema begins, waist upwards, is where it gets really depressing. 

Most kids have it where they start out doughy and then puberty (testosterone, whatever it is) makes them really thin in time. That’s what happened to Richie’s dad apparently. He looked like a vanilla donut on legs in kindergarten and then by the time he hit fifteen all the girls wanted him. Which totally feels like a lie. His dad was the second kid on the Penobscot to ever get braces, and this was apparently such a core part of his identity he went on to study them, like, _college_ study them, and when Richie pictures how the girls in his grade would respond to this the sneers are so vivid he kind of gets goosebumps. Alas. The analogy doesn’t help Richie either way, ‘cause, as is seemingly the way of the world, he got mixed up. His thirteenth birthday brought him a Commodore 64 and a copy of Maniac Mansion to slip in it and his stomach all of a sudden some odd, strained oblong shape that went puffy in the middle.

“A stressed belly,” his mom had tagged it, buying him his first communion suit. Naturally well within earshot of the guy about to fit him for it. Richie was standing in his boxers in the middle of a rainy, pre-semester shopping trip and burning with bottomless rage. “That’s why it dips in and out like that. More of a girls’ thing, usually, but apparently stress is the silent killer. I suppose it can take its toll on anyone’s body.” 

Apparently the more angry with his mom he got, the more silly and light hearted Richie spoke to her. On the surface this was because that was thirty times more likely to piss her off. Below it there were probably at least ten other reasons. He held his arms out to be tape measured, puffing his chin at her with narrow eyes. “What’s there to be stressed about, Prime Minister? I’ve only got the world’s most evil parents trying to foist their religious lifestyle onto me before I’ve even finished puberty. I’m gonna have so much Catholic guilt getting me down by the time I’m thirty I’ll be fatter than Auntie Lori.”

“You never really _finish_ puberty, Richie, growing up is a journey. And don’t talk about your Auntie Lori like that. She’s very vulnerable.”

“Yeah, ‘cause she’s got so much Catholic guilt.”

Maggie clucked her tongue. She grabbed her tote and smoothed her skirt and signalled she was about to leave the fitting room via one last, light sigh. “I think you just eat too fast…always in some kind of a rush…” 

When he checked himself out in the mirror more privately that night he found it kind of disgusting, and continued to do so for three years further. Boys aren’t meant to find their bellies disgusting, not really, not any part of themselves. They’re all boy-shaped after all. All the same Silverhawks action figure. For girls it’s probably Barbie. She-Ra, Cabbage Patch, some other doll Richie would get his ass handed to him for playing with. The point is it’s all plastic. Chewed-on, marker-punched plastic. And it’s probably super worrying that this is what Richie thinks of the only two things in this life you can be. It probably means he’s going to end up in a doctor’s office with bitten-down nails and yellow lips by the time he’s twenty, like some fallen rockstar. _I just don’t got nothing to live for_. That’s what all people who can’t be what they want end up saying. But Richie just does with this what he does with all worrying things. He just laughs at it. And scratches his legs. 

In the kitchen _He Can’t Love You_ by the Michael Stanley Band is playing and Christine is making breakfast in a cherry print apron, because this is apparently her primary grief drill. Since Sunday she’s taken on some Victorian sort of lady of the house routine. She’s the only one who switches the TV channels (always You Can’t Do That on Television or Dean Martin’s Celebrity Roast; dishwater comedy) and puts red koolaid out on the porch for the kids on the street and she’s also started calling Bobby _dear_. Which is probably the most awkward word in the English language for anyone, let alone lisping Christine, who sounds awkward saying everything. 

Richie skates straight from the staircase across the tile to snatch the anemic looking bacon rasher she’s currently plating up. Just to tool with the atmosphere. “Home ec assignment?” He wolfs between chews. “Attempted murder via laundry detergent? Rat poison? Cry for help?”

Christine looks at Richie as though he’s a dump that just won’t flush. She’s always resembled Tia from Uncle Buck but, like, if she couldn’t tie her shoelaces. Your archetypal mean girl in diaper shorts. “Breakfast. Something busy, healthy people have to get through their busy days...healthily,” she enunciates fiercely. 

Richie stretches his arms over his head with a righteous crack, yawning, “oh. I get you. I thought that was black rock cocaine.”

“Killing. Although whenever you try to talk about drugs you sound like those guys that swear they aren’t virgins then go and call girls bimbettes or...or chicklets or something else monstrous. Probably also you, while I’m thinking about it.” 

“That’s no worse than what the girls call me back.”

“What’s that?”

He keeps his elbows crowned around his head and flares his nostrils. “Sweet Cheeks.”

Christine scrapes the non-pickpocketed bacon out of the pan and onto a plate for Dad. She lingers on Bobby’s to cut the rashers into squares the size of cornflakes. (Bobby doesn’t really like meat but for some reason treats this like a generational secret. One time Mom found his birthday barbecue chilli hotdog in the trash and he’d spun for a wild, tearful tale of actually eating it, but then going for a poop, and then suffering an altercation with a wild raccoon that crawled out of the drain ending up with the whole dog ditched. He’d told Richie later that only liking the Little Debbie cakes made him feel all niminy-piminy.) “That genuinely kind of works,” she says, looking so faithfully like her mom for a moment it makes Richie’s ears whine. “Your face is just so soft and delicate. You’re like a Baby Brenda doll.”

You can tell Dad’s come in from the radio. _Salt in my tears_ is about to miserably bleat into its first verse but then there’s a noise like a wet-wipe on vinyl and it’s the Derry Loop instead. Wentworth listens to this shit so much Richie sometimes confuses the voice of the Loop’s fearless leader from 7-11 on the weekends, Johnnie Jaminet who’ll indeed get you Jammin’ It (no naughty undercurrent there - he’s checked), with his own father’s. Instead of a good morning it’s: _rise and shine merry Derry, traffic’s looking hairy! I’ve got fresh reports of a freightliner that jackknifed on Route 1, around Sullivan - yeesh - should be causing holdups ‘til much later this afternoon. All that heavy rain is taking its toll, folks, cancel your plans and relax with me to just a l-eeeeee-ttle Nu Shooz_. Then a look over his two twin children like they’re the back pages of a Christmas party catalog. 

Richie hops himself up onto the kitchen counter with his foot in his lap. He’s wearing his abominable cotton shorts, which make him look like a grandmother, but are also very cushy. He supposes if he’s going to live as a sleepless cacodemon for now that’s a crucial factor. “Untrue. But either way I wouldn't mind. They say guys with softer facial features are now considered a lot more attractive ‘cause it casts you as loving and charitable. You see a guy like that and you figure his breath smells cake-y. And that he’s posterboy for Hands Across America.” 

“Was Hands Across America even a thing? I feel like it was a ruse. You never meet anyone who did Hands Across America,” Christine says, patting Dad on the shoulder and passing him breakfast shyly. He’s miserable these days but he’s traditional. He plants a kiss on her cheek like the good old Wally Cleaver he is. 

“Totally legit. I watched it all on TV. They put a live-cam on that kid from Old Town, you know, he had his bar mitzvah in the queue. I think Mickey Mouse also made an appearance.” 

“I didn’t see anything outside.”

“That’s ‘cause Derry’s just a big period stain on the map and everything to ever happen misses us.”

Dad, now sitting at the table with his stitchy slippers up on it, says, “I think you’ll find the blood’s on _your_ pants.” 

“Um. I’m sure whatever you’re saying is super old and wise and demeaning, Dad, but. Huh?”

The sun’s only just come up outside and its powdery light makes Dad’s face look kind of ill. There’s a newspaper in his hands. He leans back in his chair, the way miraculously only adults can, and points faintly at Richie’s midriff. “You’ve got a blood stain. On those...what do you call those?” 

Richie whips his head down comically in time with Johnnie Jaminet’s _and wasn’t that a jam and a half, folks?!_. The fabled blood stain is indeed very real. It’s the shape of a rocket over his left thigh. From the looks it’s that feathery type of blood you get off of papercuts. He must have scratched himself too hard. “Oh, shit. I’m necrotizing.”

“You fell over,” his dad presumes, in the long-suffering kind of tone Richie’s been nursed on. 

“No, my eczema just shit the bed. Doctor Naylor gave me the catalog tear-out for these shorts that are meant to ease it although he’s clearly just as stupid as I have told you thirty times he is ‘cause I’m turning into Frank the Monster. ‘I am in Hell help me’ never covered anything as my current state of being so well,” Richie jaws as Christine passes him a towel with pictures of puppies on it. 

“Jesus wept,” Dad says cordially. “You’re going to need to make another appointment then.”

Richie cleans himself, or rather just stains himself a bit more with whatever dishwater the towel is soaked in. The last Naylor appointment he attended was made by Mom. It was for his ‘wild moods’ and they’d had the worst fight they ever had in the car (Richie spat on her and called her a cunt while President Bush tried to ban broccoli on the radio.) “There’s nothing you can really do past granny pants and ointment. They’re just gonna cut to amputation,” he says.

Wentworth scrunches his brow semi-teasingly. “Well, if that’s the answer, that’s the answer. Not like you’ve ever used those legs,” he says in I’m-kidding-but-I-want-you-to-doubt-it-cuz-I’m-evil tone. 

“It’s priceless you say this after I just signed up to the military. You can’t left-right-left if you’ve only got left.” 

“Make the appointment, Rich.”

He springs from the countertop to make himself look a little less teenaged, bloody legs gangling. “Can’t you just help me?! I’m telling you, I hate that place. Eddie told me all the doctors round here are practically Nazis anyway. Apparently they wear...um...spacesuits to have an appointment with you if you’re queer, even now. They did it to him ‘cause they thought _he’d_ spread germs. He’s literally eighty percent Soaky bar.” 

All he’s met with is a wry wink. Yeah, apparently Dad is capable of such things as winks and chuckles, so long as he is prompted by Richie’s great misfortune/stupidity first. “As far as I know you’re not queer. Well, fingers crossed,” he bumbles from behind a headline story on Derry’s newest missing kid (Greg Varshney, 15, infamous fibber), inappropriately sandwiched between an ad for buck season rifles and another for incontinence pills. “Nor have you ever put much stock in anything Eddie says either.”

“That’s ‘cause he’s awful. But he’s at least smart about stuff now,” Richie harps. 

“Smart’s all you need, Richard. Smart’s all you need.” He planks the paper down flat on the table. His knuckles are smoothing a picture, one he wants Richie to look at; _DERRY BEAVERS WRESTLING SPRING 1992_. It’s a bunch of boys in some sad community centre wearing unitards. Richie recognizes one of them as the guy that used to watch over him and Christine when they were really young and their parents still liked going out alone together. Nice guy while babysitting, ate a lot of their squeeze cheese, super rude at school. He’s holding a trophy with a tiger head on top. “Now these guys look smart,” Dad says intently. 

Behold. Wentworth Tozier’s own grief drill. Every time he reads about a busy young man in the paper or sees one on TV he’s overcome with some grand, uber weird presentiment of Richie’s near future. (So far he’s been pegged as a future scientist, courtesy of Quantum Leap’s fourth season getting a rerun, one of those guys that rakes the snow off the streets, magistrate, plumber, one of those other guys that takes a year abroad. The strangest one he’s so far been recommended is a model solely for sporting headgear and hats, ‘cause he “just has the right hairline for it.”) At the weekend Went had mostly been morose but now that Maggie Tozier is firmly in heaven/a small terracotta jar nobody’s got the guts to take out of the garage, he’s come up real hopeful. For Richie Tozier is still on earth. And maybe out of all this shit he could finally start to make his dad proud. 

Heartening. But deeply, deeply unrealistic. Richie makes to snort and gets second wind and then ends up doing a goat-y sort of noise. He pushes the newspaper away. “Yeah, my thoughts exactly. About to break into a little celebratory Flashdance by the looks of them,” he scoffs. 

Dad pushes it back. “ _Singlets_. They’re wearing singlets. Built like that so your opponent won’t have anything to grab you by in the ring, not to mention the aerodynamics. You wouldn’t last five minutes with all your baggy bum getup.”

“I wouldn’t last five minutes ‘cause I wear specs the size and weight of a portly baby. But at least I’d have, like, the bare minimum amount of dignity needed to survive,” Richie says, rolling his eyes back so hard the veins surely knot. 

“When you’ve got a hobby you’re passionate about you are always dignified. You’re a man.”

“Damn. Guess all that scoliosis you say I’m gonna get when I draw is just gonna turn me into David Hasselhoff, then.” 

Christine has re-emerged with a tube of Aspirin gel. This has been adopted into the last three days’ morning routine. She daubs a bit on Richie’s ever-swollen black eye every 7:20. In three more mornings she will have read a strength & health feature at school reporting Aspirin thins blood and worsens such maladies as black eyes, hence why this one won’t budge. The guilty tears will be a total migraine. Wentworth looks over at her now with a random half-frown and then looks back to Richie with a full one. 

“Well, shoot me. I’m just trying to engage you. It’s difficult to try and engage you when you won’t just pick something,” Dad says, tucking his newspaper back under the fruit bowl. His words imply effort but he’s using his voice he uses for over-the-phone sales guys. (“ _Now, Mr. Caller, that sounds mighty interesting. I’ll bet those fen-phen pills took a lot of bright, scientific minds to make. Unfortunately mine is not dim enough to buy. You can keep the pulmonary hypertension, and please put my phone number in the trash, cheerio!_ ”)

“Pick something?”

“You pick something to talk about. Here, take the newspaper. Pick a page. You can have the one about the Chinese McDonald’s...or...one about that old bum who always tries to pinch your shoes, you know, the one that sits outside the mall. What a relief! They’re jailing him. There’s even one about all that stop the nukes pother you’re into...actually...maybe not -“

Richie feels something like tears in his left eye as Christine’s thick knuckle accidentally jabs it. He has to fight the urge to rub them out with a fist and putatively whack her in the process. Guys: creatures of stoicism. “Can’t,” he squeaks, pissing all over his previous manly instincts.

“Why?” Went’s frown has now mutated into something much worse, almost as bad as his turkey face. It’s a wince. 

“I’m headed out.” 

Another notch towards doom - now it’s a smirk. “What a revelation. Headed out as in just sitting on your ass some more but under Mrs. Uris’ roof instead of mine? Or something else?”

Free from Christine’s swabbing, Richie gets up from the table with a crack of the knees. “Horror of horrors. Going to put on my spacesuit,” he says, in a voice of completeness. “I‘ve gotta go to Eddie’s.” 

Going to Eddie’s is technically a lie, but Eddie himself, by far the most grotesque part of this, is not. Before Sunday Richie hadn't so much as lent him a study hall pencil since he was in the eighth grade and still openly claimed Porky’s as his favorite movie. (Patty, who was already cool, had said to him at their very first Thursday hangout, “that explains a lot. About your banal sense of humor, I mean.”

Richie, who swore Pee Wee running around butt naked would make him laugh forever, replied, “you must be really in love with me.” She’d thrown her caboodle at his head.) After Sunday he also had no real plans to change this. Eddie had woken up and left around 8 o’clock that night with little more than a, “thanks for the...well, the carpet, I guess.” He’d apparently walked, Richie learned from watching him flee out of the window, which was extremely weird. (He lives at least six blocks away, including the particularly perilous one Mrs. Shayegan’s dobermans run free on.) Eddie had paused to retie his shoelaces by the Toziers’ front trash can. He popped a soda lip smacker out of his shoe. Once he was on his merry way, fully crackers over lip smackers, Richie decided formally to let the night go. Nothing in his life was very stable right now. That wasn’t going to change the night of a funeral. Plus, the woefully slim grip he had on his own emotions was grip enough to reveal something golden; that he’d probably have repressed this whole phase of his life by the summer anyways. His cozy night in with Eddie Kaspbrak was going the same place scenes from _Eyes Without A Face_ and that time he got a stress boner at the 8th grade science fair now laid to rot. The end. 

Well, the end, until that same Eddie Kaspbrak had popped up before the lunch bell under twenty four hours later and asked, “hey, Richie, did werewolves ever stop freaking you out? How they did when you were younger?”

He might as well have been a hologram. Richie was fresh from his bleak Kelsch consultation. He’d been trying to catch Stan coming out of gym without catching the rest of his class. There was an express spot for this - the thirteen free inches of ground between where the lockers end and the trash can starts, third floor, east wing. Discrete enough for no classmates to spot him and think _oh, that’s that guy...from the dive board...with the pool noodle_ , seen enough for Stan to meet him and not look super shifty. And, apparently, for Eddie to stand glaring at him in a particularly garish Sex Wax shirt.

“Oh my god. It’s you,” Richie had said, half dumb and half spiteful. 

“Um. Yeah?” Eddie struggled to fold his arms over himself. “I know, I look fucked up when I don’t wear Valence but I left everything at my mom’s place. My dad has one comb and it’s, like, metal.” 

“The scary part is kind of less your hair mousse capacity and more your _you_ , but it looks pretty alright.”

“Thanks. My me?”

“You know.”

Eddie fanned himself with the collar of his nightmare shirt awkwardly. He was right, when he’d talked about himself before. At school he really did look one rough shove from crapping himself all the time. “I can’t for the life of me tell which part of the equality act that’s meant to be violating, but. Fuck you too I guess. What I really wanted to talk about was the werewolves, though?” he rushed. 

Richie snapped his backpack down between them like a line in the sand. He’d wanted to say _why are you still hanging out with me?_ but when he played himself saying that in his head it had sounded very needy and sad. He also wasn’t sure how he was going to navigate Eddie’s answer. So, as was an increasingly terrible habit, he answered himself: “I know you’re spooked out about my mom dying or whatever but that doesn’t mean we can play the get to know me game all the time. I’m no longer drugged. So not 100% in the mood to deal with it anymore.”

He couldn’t remember whether Eddie Kaspbrak being impossible to scare off was a since forever thing or the result of puberty. Either way. It was becoming a problem. The boy yawned and popped a breath spritzer out of his backpack. There was a bean-shaped shaving cut on his chin. He said, “you’re so screwed up for saying ‘my mom dying or whatever’.”

“It’s my dead mom. I can say whatever I want.”

Eddie sprayed his tongue, giving a horrified bug-eye. “Dude. She’s gonna haunt you so hard. You’re gonna be brushing your teeth tonight and when you spit the mouthwash out it’ll all be fucking blood.”

“That already happened this morning. It was maggots though, and something kind of green and bubbly.”

“Disgusting.”

Richie decided he might just bite the locker room bullet. Really it wasn’t that much of an ordeal when you still had your clothes on. Watching Martin Goodarsky show off his God-given talent for farting on command was at least forty percent less nauseating if you weren’t doing so in your tighty whities. (The guy could toggle the pitch and everything. It bordered on impressive.) He stood up with what he hoped was a sense of finality. Eddie just shuffled an inch closer. At which point he surmised that this was a part of death he was just going to have to deal with, amongst emaciated bacon rashers and crazy grandfathers. Thanks a lot for that puppy, God. “I’m not scared of werewolves. I’m sixteen. And I love John Landis,” he gave in.

Eddie’s face practically smouldered. He stuffed his spritzer away without bothering to fix the lid and half-whispered, “I majorly need your help.” Then he talked Richie’s brain into purée all the way to the next bell. He needed only the tiniest bit of interest to spill his guts, apparently, which in spite of their different motivations Richie kind of empathized with, and so at least listened to. 

The points he’d managed to absorb: Adam Weisshart’s little brother, twelve years old, was the third kid to go missing in Derry in the space of a month. His name was Simon. Eddie had never met him but had heard enough from Adam to know he was tall for his age and obsessed with the movie The Elephant Man. (“Like, disturbingly so. I know a lot of kids who are obsessed with Guns ‘N’ Roses and Iron Maiden and Hanna-Barbera cartoons and stuff. But why the dick would it be _Elephant Man_?!”) Simon also spent a lot of time hanging out in the woods, as most terribly bored children that live here do. Namely at Ghostly Gulch. This was not so much a gulch and more where the ground got craggy and high just over the Kenduskeag, the earth side of the Flour Mill Falls incline. It had a bunch of trees that’d been there since the Civil War and eventually melted off into the old Derry train station. Complete with rebuilt railway tunnel that collapsed and squashed fifty miners like wood wasps back in the Space Race era. And had housed Arthur Hendricks’ dead body three weeks ago. Just to name a few things that made the place ghostly. 

Eddie, stubborn and particular as ever, had always ignored all of these things in favor of an old werewolf story. The Gulch had been his and Richie’s main hotbed when they were little. They’d built a den and everything (abandoned shopping cart, butternut branch and the hideous purple jelly jacket Maggie used to make Richie wear. He’d told her Henry Bowers stole it only for her to actually go and report this to Principal O’Pray over the phone. Richie mysteriously finished sixth grade in an arm sling.) One of the guys at Eddie’s dad’s weird classic car group had once told him, when he had an ear infection and had to be brought along to a meeting, that a werewolf used to run the railway station in the 70s. The townspeople had always been suspicious of his monobrow and large, over-the-nose cicatrix. Then some old lady coming off the late train had apparently seen him in full canine form on Halloween night - snout, yellow eyes, blood all over his teeth. When she reported him to the cops the next morning they couldn’t find him. They did, however, find a severed leg in his booking office. As ya do. 

The reason this story had not made it to the definitive Ghostly Gulch legend list was the fact the old lady was badly addicted to her Klonopin meds. Which had turned it all into more of a Just Say No thing (“which was so fucking stupid ‘cause clonazepam is a licit drug you can literally get at Walgreens. Like, say no to what? The medical industry?!”) This left it purely as the story of a weird creepy guy. And Derry gets around twenty of those a year. Eddie was alone in his eleven-year-old werewolf hunting fervor. He always left beef sandwiches as bait on the train tracks, like apples for pixies, but they’d still be there all moldy next time he came out to play. Richie used to stamp the ants on them.

Final absorbed point: a proposal. “The cops don’t know about Ghostly Gulch. Well, they don’t know about it how we used to know about it. I figured if I went and scoped it out, with all my mastery over its lore, I’d know where Simon is within twenty minutes. Tops. You could come with me for the sake of the buddy system,” was Eddie’s positively risible plan. 

Richie’s head was muzzy and he was actually semi invested at this point, which is a rare thing to behold, if you aren’t a brand new comic about vampires and/or dogs or a righteous burp. Judging, but invested. Eddie speaking for a long time uninterrupted was admittedly a wonder. When he got out of breath he even gained a slight European lilt. “You for real think a _werewolf_ got him? As opposed to the huge rocky ledge of doom with no safety signs?” Richie asks dryly. 

“I mean. Well, obviously not,” is Eddie’s tight response. “But when some messed up thing happens someplace legendary it’s usually related. Plus if it was a fall he’d have been found by now. Looking like one of those bendy poppers in Happy Meals.”

“If that’s where he spent all his time, and where one Arthur already died, and nothing’s turned up yet, then it’s pretty safe to say the cops’ll still be on it. Probably all covered in tape and shit.” 

“Cops belong in Hell. And it’d just be cool for it to be _me_ , you know? I’ve never done anything important for Adam apart from...I don’t know...hold his bag for him while he went to go pee one time.”

“He can’t just take his bag to pee?” 

“He gets claustrophobic.” 

Eddie leaned back against the opposite fire exit doors, which were fluttering open a little. A blast of autumn cold ruffled the _Mr. Zoggs_ on his shirt into a pretzel shape. Richie scratched his knee profusely and said, “isn’t that kind of, like, morally corrupt? To only try rescue a kid in danger ‘cause you wanna take his brother to Beefsteak Charlie’s and kiss him over the top of a table?”

“Stop yanking my chain. Good deeds are good deeds, Richie, it doesn’t matter if I happen to like Adam ‘cause that stuff’s human nature. Also Beefsteak Charlie’s has an infestation of...everything, at this point.” 

“Biting babies’ faces and schadenfreude are also human nature. Just for your information.”

“Wouldn’t you do it if there was a girl you were really, really into? One you wanted to know you’d do anything for her?”

Distressingly, Richie’s instinctual response was ‘no’. Every real life crush he’s ever had has been very take it or leave it. “I still don’t get why I’m your partner on this one. I’m only gonna shit on every conclusion you come to and not take anything seriously. You’re probably thereby gonna end up wolfing out and killing _me_ and then you’ll be in jail and you’ll marry Adam all haggard in a stripy jumpsuit,” is what he said instead. 

To which Eddie shrugged, and popped the fire exit open with his hip rather masterfully. “You’re the only one that gets the Gulch like I do, Lulu. You’re no scaredy-cat,” he replied. Then he was off across the courtyard just as the rain started. A wet wind whipped one of Arthur Janecki’s memorial posters free from its pinboard and across his backpack like a ghost. 

-

Richie meets Eddie outside the Bike Shoppe (which is not bike or shoppe related at all, but is rather a hot-dog truck just outside the library), awkwardly in the middle of a bunch of road construction. “Fatberg,” a guy in a Penobscot County Utility cap explains. The clouds are dark and wobbly for the seventh day in a row so all the workers have taken a break to grumble and point at it. “One the size of a fuckin’ house, I figured.” 

“What’s a fatberg?” asks Bobby Tozier from behind his bunged up Etch a Sketch Animator. Richie’s had to take him out ‘cause Dad got an emergency work call. Vertical root fracture, fateful KFC drumstick, poor little middle schooler Kelly Dunne. Apparently her mom has been having to give her vodka shots to let her sleep through the night night. You could hear the kid slurring _Too Drunk To Fuck_ in the background over the phone. 

Baseball cap shrugs. He’s got one sleeve rolled up on the arm he’s chugging a quart of Magic Cow with and it’s covered in hairy moles. “A berg made out fat,” he says as if guessing. “You ever play with putty? Cuz it’s like putty. Imagine your putty is a ball of fat and the ground is made out of fat and everything is made out of fat and when one fatty thing meets the other it gets all thick and stuck together. And then that sticky ball falls down a drain. And it gets stuck in the corroded pipes and makes them more corroded.” 

Bobby gives him the sort of nod only a boy who’d grown up with Grandpa Donnie appearing at all his birthday parties could manage. A too shy to say what the fuck are you talking about nod. “You’re trying to pull out the fatberg, then,” he squeaks.

“More just trying to pull out the drain itself at this point, it’s all on the fritz.”

“How will anyone use the bathroom?”

“You’ll have to hold it,’ Baseball cap says earnestly. 

Richie gives Bobby a nudge in the sweatered rib before he can kick up a rumpus. “They’re gonna fit a new one, Blobby,” he says, sitting up on the wrought library fence. Got one of those bandaids the size of a Tandy on his thigh and it’s making him sit like an awkward monkey. “I know. Pretty mind-boggling that anyone cares enough to have it put in motion. Mayor Husock left that sinkhole back in winter going for six months ‘cause it was ‘probably God’s will anyway’ when it was legit at the back of a daycare centre, but. I guess Derry values its shits more than its little kids getting sucked into Hell.” 

The guy wipes his milk off his chin and looks at Richie in confused sort of amusement. Probably about to say something like _funny, man, although you probably shouldn’t make tons of jokes about kids dying right now, just ‘cause of the, uh..._ or _Mayor Husock’s doing the best he can, ya know, it’ll probably click when you’re a little older_ or _I have no idea what you just said_. But, woe and behold, it’s Eddie Kaspbrak’s voice splitting down this street at this moment. He materialises by the curb like the magic cop car in Masters of the Universe. “Damn, you broke something already?!” He whoops, the rain starting to fall as he does, jean jacket hiked up over his head in a shot. 

Richie’s disc player falls out of his backpack leaping off the fence. Bobby saves it before that and the Joe Jackson tape snapped inside are gone for good. “Fatberg,” he says, at the same time as his older brother’s, “probably. Practically pooped my guts out after breakfast.”

Eddie rubs his nose and looks at them weirdly. His mom used to tell him never to smile back if strangers smiled at him when he was a kid otherwise they might think he was ‘buying a pig in a poke’, Richie remembers it all of a sudden, whatever the shit that meant. Now he’s stuck looking at everyone like he’s holding in a fart forever just so he never finds out. “Sup Bobby. What’s a fatberg?” He puffs. 

“Well. Basically, it’s like when you’re playing with putty and then you drop the putty, but it’s fat, and the ground is fat and then -” 

“Load of gunk in the pipes,” Richie offers. 

“And then is a load of gunk in the pipes, yes.” 

“Oh. Right.” Eddie scrunches his hands in the thick of his hair where the rain flushes it. Apparently the weird little Californian flick thing going on up there _isn’t_ something he wants removed at lickedy speed. “You’re getting tall, huh. What’re you drawing?” 

Bobby runs a pink thumb over his face furtively, dropping one hand from his Animator so Eddie can look at it if he wrings his neck up. “You mean _animating_. It’s the one where you make the pictures move like on Cartoon Network,” he says, with a matter-of-fact flap of the hand. Cartoon Network’s been on air for a solid two months and it’s revolutionized what it means to be a sixth grader, allegedly. Richie wouldn’t know. He never watched Augie Doggie while belly-flopped on the couch that time they thought a fresh tumor might be growing into Maggie’s stent (which was actually just a really bad case of indigestion - grace à discounted Hydrox cookies) and he was pulled out of school to sit around looking sad about it. He wasn’t hysterically amused by Doggie Daddy accidentally chugging a flying potion and then chugging a shrinking potion an episode later. That totally never happened. “I’m making a cartoon of Dad ‘cause Richie told me to. It’s one where he eats a goat.” 

Eddie raises an eyebrow so smoothly Richie lets half an elephant laugh slip out. “It’s _has the head_ of a goat, you fuckin’ herb,” he chokes. “Satanic mash up where he’s feasting on a newborn. Gonna show it to him at dinner tonight.” 

“Right. Fantastic,” Eddie hums. His brow’s still up in the air and he’s swivelled to stare at Richie under it. “Are you planning on subjugating your kid brother all day today, or - ?”

“Naw. He’s got his paper-mashy club in 5.” Richie dips his head back towards the library, as Bobby says, “paper-mache, puppetry,” wearily and yanks on his brother’s backpack to stuff his toy inside. Not-the-worst-brother-ever stamp of the day - said backpack is packed with a Powerhouse candy bar for Bobby’s grabbing pleasure.

“You gotta wait to pick him up?”

“Footloose and fancy free, Swayze. Lets take care of this werewolf before my dinner’s on the stove.”

-

Richie in the middle of the forest looks kind of like a newborn baby in the middle of a disco rave, or at least in his head he does. He walks as if he’s doing that corky Love Shack dance so none of the branches catch where his pants are too short. Another thing that makes him feel really sixteen but, like, in the shitty way. Not a single pair of skidz can make it past the fat bone in his ankle and also sometimes when he’s walking he forgets how balance is meant to work. He also apparently doesn’t know how to make conversation with anyone that isn’t Stanley Uris. Richie’s just been watching Eddie jump hurdles over fallen trees and offering very weird, humourless analogies where he sees fit for a solid ten minutes. 

“I had a dream about you last night,” Eddie says on his fourth hurdle, pausing to triple knot his shoelaces. He ties them bunny-ears like a kid. “It was kind of fucked up, though. You fell off that big wooden rocket thing they had on the middle school playground and the bump on your head just started rotting.” 

“Damn. You must have been thinking of me so whimsically before you fell asleep. And been eating, like, an entire block of Stilton,” Richie attempts. He skims a little sap off the trunk with the corner of his shell-top. Trees on the outskirts of the forest always drop dead and turn black after a year or two ‘cause it’s so wet out there, the roots can’t take it. There’s so many toppled ones when you’re coming in through the interstate it looks like some tiny, underwhelming Chernobyl of the west. 

Eddie whips up and gives an anxious yawn. “Cheese makes me retch. I just get dreams like that all the time. Either a narcoleptic thing or I’m Damien Thorn.”

“You probably shouldn’t tell the people you dreamed about what you dreamed about. It feels like bad juju.” 

“Sorry,” he mumbles. He’s trying to scrape the mud off his left sneaker by rubbing it on his right sneaker but is just making a huge, duck-foot mudpie. “If it helps I had a disgusting one about myself right after. One where I got pregnant. I was quite calm about it. I think I joined an aquanatal club and everything but then when it was time for the baby to come out things got weird.” 

Richie pauses to snap a twig off the next trunk, waving it at Eddie roughly. Eddie stops with the same sort of ‘fuck off’ and ‘go ahead’ conglomerate expression he’d worn all Sunday night. Richie drawls, “beastly, but ultimately unsurprising. What happened next?” and spoons the gunk off his shoes. 

“I thought I could get a C section but no such luck. They just chopped my dick off and pulled the baby out of this big, bloody gaping thing,” Eddie says in an inappropriately thoughtful tone. He’s watching Richie work with rapt attention. Likely ready to axe kick the second he tries making a monkey out of him or possibly just to thank him for the favor (?). 

“That feels symbolic. If you see a rat in your dreams it means someone is lying to you and if you see your own sex pistol getting axed it means you’re a big pussy.” 

“Ha-ha. It’s a real life procedure, you know.”

“That’s not how a vasectomy works. My dad has one and it’s just two cuts with stitches. It even makes you fuck better, I heard.” 

“No, I mean how they do it for transsexual people.” 

Gloriously, Richie has managed to scratch the shoes clean without any spoofing. He stands back and grins at his work like a hunter over a dead deer. Also shoves the soiled stick in Eddie’s face, as his good deed will allow for seven bad ones on the house. Logically speaking. “The fuck’s a transsexual?” He says, spotting Eddie’s nose. “Is that that kinky thing from San Francisco? You know, that inside out...backwards flip thing. West coasters are so twisted.”

Eddie scrubs himself with his knuckles feverishly. “Literally no idea what you’re talking about but I think whoever told you that was trying to sling off at you. I mean those people that go from boy to girl or girl to boy with a sex change. Like the little girl in Sleepaway Camp but way, way less scary.” 

“What, you can do that?” 

“Yes, Biff. If you want to you can do that.”

“Why would you want to though?”

He shrugs, neatly hopping a rock on the path. Pulling a hockey move. “Because it’d make you feel better about yourself,” he says in a teacherly voice over his damp, denim shoulder. “Some people don’t like their nose or the pitch of their voice or...I don’t know...how their ass looks in stirrup pants. Other people don’t like their sex. Rare but it happens. Considering you’re a straight dude and you live here I can forgive you for not totally getting it.”

Richie gives an arrogant little ‘pft’. He notices that weird sort of light around Eddie again, as the trees thatch up thicker above them and the sun goes blue. That _boyish_ light on his pointy elbows and hairy nape of neck. Taking note of the conversation this is a significantly disturbing thought process to be following but. Richie just does that sometimes. When he and Christine were eleven she got chicken pox and the sight of the wonky, gritty little ulcers all over her back had made him feel so weird he polka dotted himself raw with red Papermate Flairs. He sat by the mirror and pretended to writhe in pain. Just so the feeling was more tactile. If he’d have seen those pictures in _When AIDS Comes Home_ in the paper back then he might have stabbed instead of drawn. “Well, dag spanky,” he garbs. “Forgot we were playing on opposite teams. Just when I’m starting to respect and bond with you, the social stratum kicks in. We’re like Tess and Angel.” 

Eddie gives a ‘gotcha’ click of the fingers. “Don’t worry Richie. You kept me up all night ‘cause your boobs weren’t coming in and wore Wonder Woman Underoos past double digits, so, I’d say you’re an honorary queer.”

“ _How_ do you remember this stuff?!” 

“Oh, you know. In the hopes I’ll someday prompt that face you’re pulling right now.” 

He throws his stick with the oddly professed flick he knows won’t land anywhere near Eddie’s head but will sure look like it for a moment. Richie figures he’d be a whole Joe Montana if gym lessons were just set out as ways to fuck with people. “Or ‘cause you’re morally anorectic. I don’t constantly bring up your weird shit because point one, I’m a good, decent guy, and point two, I’ve moved on. My life has been so star-studded since I last properly hung out with you, I just have no need to hold onto the time you cried and made me pray with you in the middle of the _math_ cause of Challenger. It’s water under the bridge.”

Eddie shrinks into himself as the rain comes harsh through the trees and he gets a little hoity-toity. “Who the fuck didn’t cry about Challenger? Mr. Montorzi even cried. He put it on the wheelie TV and the whole class got collective trauma,’ he says tersely. 

“Collective hysteria, more like. I didn’t cry once.” 

“You are not a good example. You didn’t even cry at your mom’s funeral,” he babbles, so clearly regretful after he’s done his voice almost sounds like it’s playing in reverse. Richie can take it though. He gives Eddie a sharp dig in the rib just ‘cause that’s what guys do when settling scores. Eddie winces and hugs himself. 

“I’m only a touchy feely guy if Kelly Lebrock or possibly Debbie Gibson asks. All innuendos aside I think Debbie Gibson would like a sensitive man,” is Richie’s sage reply. “You know, it’s always the home-grown apple pie girls that like sensitive men. That’s how Arie wound up going out with a roller chick like Karen Weingarten last summer. He just had to be seen with a copy of _Orlando_ and she was head over wheels.” 

A low snort comes from the turtle heap that is apparently still Eddie. “I’m with Karen on that one. Boys who cry are way more intriguing. Arie’s pretty intriguing on his own but a bit of eyeliner and shoegaze could make him next level,” he mumbles. 

“Rewind. You know Arie?” 

“Merry Derry’s Jewish community is not exactly expansive.”

“And you all just hang out with each other all the time?” 

“Only really on Shabbat. Arie, Stan and Patty are the only people at the service who aren’t my parents or disturbingly similar to my parents, so. Yeah. How is that weird?’

Richie makes this piping _yeeeeeeeee-sh_ sound through his teeth. It’s his go-to for those rare occasions his brain actually absorbs things and sends him signals accordingly. A true rara avis. “Less weird and more just a little creepy. When taken into account you didn’t want to be friends with _me_ anymore, I mean. Kind of creepy you were still hanging around my people,” he says, signals reading roughly: _VULNERABLE, GET OUTTA THURR_.

Eddie peeks an eye over the balled up collar of his jacket. It’s like he’s put himself on low power mode or something. 5150-EDD13 only available at Computerland and Sears, best performance yet, weighing in at a mighty compact 156 lbs. Take him home and fill him with Midway kiddy crap ‘til steam comes out. “That’s so fucking brain dead, Richie,” he deadpans. “You’re the furthest thing from my mind when I choose who my friends are, thanks.” 

“In some ways I believe that. Otherwise you wouldn’t spend all your lunches with a bunch of...of sentient potatoes,” is Richie’s miserable failure at a patch-up. 

“I’m able to be friends with people who are different to me because I don’t think I’m the only person to ever matter. I don’t see the bad in everyone.” 

“Apologies, Saint Eddie.”

“Can you stop?”

Richie pulls a can of Dr. Pepper from his bag with such puissant gusto he cuts his thumb on the metal flipper. “No, your holy-moliness, it really can’t be understated. Your kindness has done wonders for jocks everywhere. One day you’re gonna get some automobile repair shop named after you in honor, E.K. Motors, special thanks to that doormat for upping my leftie cred in high school,” he gargles through the bubbles all over his chin. Eddie isn’t walking anymore. He doesn’t reply, either; he’s bending down a few feet back like an old lady with a dropped purse / a guy off one of those crack cocaine rise PSAs. “Oh my God. It’s not _that_ serious, man.” 

Eddie sinks so his butt’s about an inch from the ground and his head is level with the shrubs. “Please just shut up,” he slurs. “I’m tired.” 

“The Gulch is five minutes away.” 

“Richie,” he says with all the astringence he can muster. Instead of elaborating, he lets off a snore, and slumps properly. Richie is so thrown off his course by this his stupidus reflexus almost kicks in and makes him go to riff off said snore like it’s an insult. That seems about right. Teasing and arguing with a sleeping boy. Even the inert need to know he’s not small. 

He can’t remember if the don’t wake ‘em up rule is just for sleepwalkers or it goes for narcoleptics too. In all fairness Eddie’s kind of both. He’s Sleeping Beauty if the film had been a David Cronenberg feature. Alas, leaving the tendons in his neck to die and his quiff to get rained on seems cruel. “I really, really hate you,” he says distractedly, retracing his steps and scooting Eddie along the mud by his armpits a little. Drawing on the time Bobby fainted at the movie theatre in the middle of the Dark Crystal (Skeksis monsters - six months’ worth of night terrors) on Richie’s day to watch him, worth an incredible three dollars fifty, he flips him up over his shoulder and teddy bear carries him down the path. 

The Gulch is more like forty five seconds away. Eddie’s timing kind of couldn’t have been worse. Richie lugs him ‘til the ground is high up, and you can perfectly see the whole kenduskeag over where it melts off into rock. The broken rope all the boys swung off on the end-of-freshman-year skinny dip and ended up with bruised butts at the bottom of. The horrifying lack of tape, anywhere. Damn. Mayor Husock really _is_ trying to kill off the under-18 Derry population. Richie awkwardly deposits Eddie at the mouth of the unblocked tunnel to keep his back up and where his shirt is ruffled you can see something like a burn on his hip. You can also notice, once he’s down, just how warm he’d been to hold a second ago.

Richie sits opposite and chugs his can until he wakes up again. It’s a surprisingly drawn out process. After opening his eyes there are three more steps of groaning, clutching his head, and also chugging the quarter Richie couldn’t finish. “Is this the...the place where he died?” Eddie maunders. “Sorry. The werewolf place. The Gulch.” 

“No, it’s Iowa. You were out like a light.”

Eddie wipes his mouth and cracks his elbows. His jacket flutters loose enough to let the light touch a Top Gun print on his shirt. Weird. “Did you just sit here watching me the whole time, or?” 

“If I wanted to watch a freaky little guy snore and drool at close range I’d just pay my grandpa a visit. Dad keeps saying I need to before he kicks the bucket anyways,” Richie says, all of a sudden feeling hyper-conscious of what the rainwater’s done to his hair. His fish eye reflection in the bottom of Eddie’s can looks like dragged-through-fiery-swamps-of-hell David Bowie. “I was doing what all esteemed or soon to be esteemed artists do. Gathering inspiration.” 

The groggy boy opposite him stands up stiffly, looking around the tunnel at their heels the way you look at all the new release banners in the Aladdin foyer. He pops a key-ring torch out of his pocket and starts flicking it around. “Oh God. You still play the clarinet?!” Eddie snickers on high reverb. 

“What? No. Well, yeah. But I’m talking about _real_ art. Apparently drawing on paper is taken a lot more seriously than drawing on walls and fridges and shit so I’ve been making a gradual transition over the last couple of years. Cartoons and comics, primarily. I’m gonna be the American Brian Boland.”

“That’s cool. Is that where your horned father eating babies alive usually goes, in your cartoons?”

“Usually, yes. They say draw what makes you squirm so mostly I just draw Dad without his bald spot spray on. It’s like that Oprah and Ann-Margret mashup but Ann-Margret’s a homely northern dentist and Oprah’s Jeff Goldblum after he got out of that telepod.” Richie leans his head back against the cold stone wall and realises just how gloomy this thing is. Looking down into the thick of the tunnel he could never tell how far it goes. It’s black and lonely enough to go forever, probably. “At the moment I’ve got my first real project though. Stiggs & Fudge-Dog is the working title, also the two main characters, only Stiggs is the dog-man and Fudge-Dog is the cat-man ‘cause the whole thing is meant to be very surreal. They’re best friends during the post-apocalyptic era. Trying to prevent the post-post-apocalypse but they’re just a couple of boneheads, you know, all they’re sure about is wanting to hang out together. Stiggs dies for Fudge-Dog in the end. It’s tragicomedy.”

Eddie pivots with a slightly odd expression on his face. _SICK OF YUPPIE SCUM_ is lit up behind him in purple pen on the wall but he’s got a restless hand in the middle of it and it just says _SICK OF YU UM_. “Oh,” he says. 

Richie wipes the sweat off his forehead and puts his grownup face on. (Chin popped and flared nostrils. Patty Blum will point out in around a week’s time it makes him look like a donkey and he’ll start calling it donkey face and swearing he came up with the title, seriously, Patty just made a sharp guess.) “What? There’s a comic already like that?” 

“No, no. It’s certainly in a minority.”

“Oh okay. And that’s a compliment in noid speak?”

“You’re a fucking noid. Yeah. It’s good.”

“Eds,” Richie says sincerely. A freezing wind whines through the tunnel and knocks his glasses onto his cheeks a moment. “You remember that time we tried to break into Mr. Christie’s house and stage a Martian invasion ‘cause he called you ‘foreign-looking’ and we wanted to, like, activate a heart attack? But, refer back to figure 1, you are a noid and you didn’t tie your shoelaces so you kept slipping every way we tried to get in. And when Christie saw you flying off the pillar of his porch like a pole dancer and asked you what you were doing, you started pretending like you were some kind of boy scout. You were like _oh, Mr Christie, you’ve got such a sunny little place! Your porch is so Californian! Can I ask you a couple questions about the Corinthian Order on this thing for my upcoming art project, it’s so regal, or I could, like, go home and never speak of this again, ha-ha?!_ Well, yeah. That’s how you’re talking to me now. You’re talking to me like I’m a senile, racist maintenance millright with cardiological vulnerabilities. It’s upsetting.”

Eddie walks just outside the entrance, craning his neck to try and see the roof of it. “I actually completely forgot about Mr. Christie but thank you for unearthing that hardship. It really helped get your point across,” he says moodily. “Can you see anything suspicious or are you just gonna ramble with your head down?” 

“Lively as a grig, comrade,” Richie pipes, putting his arms up over his head. “In most ways I’m in a better position than you. I think _inside_ the unrestricted tunnel of death is probably where Simon’s likely to be. If I wasn’t a stable person I’d say this would actually be a really good place for a werewolf to hide.” 

“What a universe that would be. Does it smell...doggy in there?” 

“Yeah but I think that’s me.” 

Eddie flops back down from his tunnel roof search, looking vaguely awkward. The top clearing of the Gulch is small in terms of being an investigation ground. It’s got the tunnel, a rock or two and a load of shopping bags. Nothing that’d ever really notice or change upon housing a violent slaughter. “I...it’s stupid as fuck but, I kind of feel something. Not even in the supernatural way if you’re not gonna get that. But I feel like this is a place where things happen.” 

Richie wants to shrewdly point out the fact a kid got mauled by a bear here barely a week ago, but there’s something else he wants to say too that he can’t really figure out (despite being able to feel it is very gnawing) so he stays silent and kind of nauseous for a second. “Hey,” he says after a beat, the exact same time as thunder pumps above them. Make that two Damien Thorns. “Hey, Eddie.”

“Yeah?”

“Did you make this up?” 

Eddie’s expression goes through some minor explosion. He’s confused, mad and horribly upset in 0.03 seconds all while his face is no longer a face but a burning heap of leaves. “Are you kidding me?” 

“I don’t mean Simon and everything. Obviously. But I mean, like. Did my dad tell you to keep hanging out with me, on the phone?” 

“You think _so_ hideously of me it’s started rotting your brain. I invited you with me ‘cause it’s humiliating doing something for a boy in front of my...my sentient potato friends and I didn’t want to come out here on my own,” Eddie storms. “I was gonna invite you to Adam’s recital tomorrow as well but I guess that’s all too staged for you.”

“Recital for what?”

“Poetry.”

“Oh my god.” 

He throws his arms up either side him and lets off a disbelieving cluck from the back of his throat, staring up into the rain. Which makes Richie twig that maybe he _is_ thinking, like, 15% more poorly of Eddie than he should be. Either that or he’s feeling bad about himself. Both of which call for immediate and extraordinary display of idiocy. Richie unearths himself from the wet grit and train-track half glueing his pants to the floor and joins Eddie out in the open. He thrusts his shoe up on the small slope aside the tunnel entrance. The thunderstorm sops him as he starts to climb and says, “either way, I suppose you made the right choice. I understand these boy-related matters. Me and my Wonder Woman Underoos and massive milky honkers, whenever they do decide to blossom, we’re here for ya!”

“Richie, _please_ , please-please-please no matter how mad at me you are do not find a way to mangle yourself in front of me right now. I seriously can’t take the moral dilemma,” Eddie warbles, maybe with some, secret streak of a laugh in his voice somewhere. 

“Rest your pipes, man. I’m just trying to show you something.” 

“I don’t wanna see it. I could not be less impressed by flips or jumps or any hospital-cruising shit.” 

“I said _cram it!_ ” He says, really having to bellow over the downpour up here, something he’s randomly just learned he isn’t very good at. Richie finds his balance at the top lip of the tunnel via crouching like a turtle and tipping himself backwards. There’s only a tiny little roof before it disappears into mountainous earth. He could probably climb to the top of that, too, if there weren’t currently a pint of rainwater in each of his sneakers. But for now he just points - specifically to a small, shuttered cabin just over it. “See it?!” 

The tunnel isn’t really that high but somehow Eddie on the ground looks like a pinprick. Richie’s brain rolls an odd cutscene of jumping and crushing him. “Um. Not really.” 

“Walk backwards and then look over the top.”

“Okay.” Three seconds of shuffling and squinting. “What, someone lives here?” 

Richie nods, mopping his neck with the sleeves of his K-Way. “Yup. Or someone has at some point in time. Being right here on top of it all I figured it would have been your lupine railmaster,” he says. When he looks back Eddie’s working his way up to a grin with his hands thatched over his head. It’s easier to see him for what he is further away. Less of an evil defector and more just _oh, hey, it’s that kid I used to chum with, that piece of my youth a scrapbook couldn’t hold, albeit the only piece of my youth worth putting in one, maybe_. Which alerts Richie to the fact he has probably missed Eddie a lot. That he does miss Eddie. And also, as his hips wobble and the grin flips so fast Eddie probably splits his lip in the process, that he’s really fucking tired. 

-

The rest of the weekend is slow and dark and the presidential debate plays on TV four times. Richie watches a little of it Saturday dinner time with his sister. He’s only selectively interested in this stuff. When he’s at home he’s some jaded, educated city college boy who thinks these crooks are ruining them all and when he’s with Stan and Patty he barely knows his left from his jerkwater right. Three stale cheese sandwiches and fifteen minutes of Bush teasing Slick Willie like they’re a pair of little girls later, he decides to put his shoes on and visit the latter. 

Stan and Arie aren’t watching it, refreshingly, because their mom and dad don’t think you should ‘put politics in the home’. Richie likes to make lofty judgements depending on what people watch on TV in the evening. He sometimes takes notes when he’s walking down his street and the neighbours have their living room curtains gaping loose; the Klipps’ set playing Who’s The Boss? (dumb), the Cottons’ Rhythm & Blues (horrifying), the Stringers’ Sinead O’Connor slashing the pope’s picture on Saturday Night Live (awesome). Sure, you might live in a box house opposite the graveyard in the sticky, smelly armpit of America, but if you use your remote wisely, your life might still be great. The Uris’ are doing marvellously by this logic, with The Twilight Zone firing up as he comes through the door. 

Richie eats a second dinner there (Mrs. Uris made angel hair pasta). He doesn’t tell his friends about Eddie in the woods because he hasn’t told them about Eddie at the funeral yet and it’ll all take much more explaining and shiftiness than it’s worth. He tells them about the Derry Beavers wrestling team instead, something Arie is perturbingly excited about. 

“Richie, man, you’re looking at this all wrong,” he says, leaning over the back of the couch. He’s got a white button shirt on in the way only cool guys get away with. “Wrestling is _awesome_. It’s not about sweaty Gold’s Gym guys anymore, it hasn’t been since the seventies. Now it’s all about camp and theatre and...and stupid costumes. Textbook weird kid goldmine.” 

“Who you calling a weird kid?! All of that just makes it, like, galactically more exhausting. The stress of having a big guy dressed like he’s out of a Crystal Light commercial sat on my neck is so far beyond enough without also starring in the Rocky Horror Picture Show,” Richie levels with him over, funnily enough, a can of Crystal Light. The Uris residence is eighty five percent fizzy drinks and fifteen percent orange hippie-weave rugs. 

Arie whips his hand on the throw impatiently. “I thought you’d like dressing like that. You’ve gotta if your favorite movie’s -”

“No way, never, negatory. My dad’s probably gonna have forgotten about it by the time I come home anyway. I’ll get back and he’ll be signing me up to competitive duck herding or something.”

Robin Ward is quietly trying to whisk them off to _that off track betting parlor we call... the Twilight Zone_ from the front of the room. Arie looks up to catch the title screen. Title screens are his favorite part of all media, apparently, ‘cause that’s when you get the thrill of it all. (“If you’re watching _Videodrome_ then, sure, you’re gonna be tossing your popcorn over ‘long live the new flesh’ and all the fucked up hallucinations. But nothing will ever top the fact alone you’re watching _Videodrome_ , nothing’s as exhilarating as that. You’ll remember that feeling when the title pops up and you know you can’t go back forever.”) This one is for the most part blocked off by Stanley and Mr. Uris trying to set up a new coffee table on the carpet - one they’ll realise by the time the credits roll has been sold to them without a stretcher beam, hence why it’s falling apart with every new screw - so he loses interest pretty fast. “Screw duck herding. You’re too cool for that. You gotta be Mr. Perfect,” Arie says. 

Richie twists backwards to look at him like he’s just crapped his pants. He kind of hates himself for being generally very impressed with everything Arie says, even (if not especially) the things he doesn’t understand. Being unimpressed by this world makes it so much easier to live in. “That was my mom’s first idea on what to call me. Once I popped out a ready-made star she decided I’d need to grow up with a little humility,” he drags, feigning unimpressed, unfolding unimpressive. 

“I mean the wrestler, Curt Hennig. He’s definitely top five,” Arie goes on. “Or I can kind of picture you as a Superfly - Jimmy Snuka - he does all that high flying catapulting bizzo. Bring a Brainbuster or two to the Derry wrestling scene. You just have to pretend like you’re He-Man and your opponent is, I don’t know, Patty, then: boom. You’re a badass.” 

“You know Stew Dubinski’s on the team? Squeeze cheese barmy army Stew Dubinski, used to be your grade I think.” 

“Oh my God. Now you _have_ to try out. He flushed my Kangaroos down the toilet. I’m never going to be able to afford new Kangaroos in my life.” 

“I don’t have to join the same wrestling team as him to pay my thanks. I can just tell him when I see him in town, bud, no skin off my conk.” 

Arie bats Richie’s glasses off his face with a snort. (Probably the friendliest touch he’s been administered in the last year. Richie is almost warm and fuzzy inside over transitory blindness) Then he scurries off for his precious VHS vault - an old box of multipack Suzie Q’s which he could probably now get arrested for, considering the sheer amount of unreturned rentals rattling around inside. That’s how they spend the rest of the night. First on an old tape of Vince McMahon’s WWE from the bottom of the pile, back when Hulk Hogan was still avant-garde and not a Saturday Night Live funnyman, followed by a fresh one Arie had recorded a week or two ago. Randy Savage ( _o-oooooo-h y-eeeeaaaaa-h_!) versus Jake the Snake Roberts, both of whom are a little terrifying. Mr Uris stops with a claw hammer suspended mid-bang and rolled up sweatshirt sleeves to watch Randy tell Jake he thinks he’s _so elegant when you talk, snake man, but I don’t like anything about you_ , and Stanley the same to shake his head hysterically at this. 

“You see?! They’re basically comic book villains. Basically...basically drag queens,” Arie rattles. Richie’s watching with his head on the arm of the sofa and his nose all runny. Randy gives a stiff little swish to reveal _Macho Man_ in glitter on the back of his jacket and snot shoots as Richie splits into horrified giggles. He pictures himself in a jacket like that. Twirling around the Aladdin foyer arcade with it buttoned up to his chin, oh God, the button’s stuck, his macho fingers can’t pull it off. 

“Sure, yeah. I majorly don’t think this is the kind of thing Derry Community Hall’s got going on, but. Admittedly very surreal,” he says thickly through a knuckle wipe. 

Arie shrugs, cheeks lit up green as Randy’s sparkling sleeves. He doesn’t quite look real for a second. Material Boy. “Make it your own. If your dad’s gonna force you, just make it your own,” is his computer game coded response. “You always liked playing characters.” 

Richie sleeps at home, despite several invites to Stanley’s Space Ghost sleeping bag from all four members of the family, either out of guilt or self-destruction or a delightful mix of both. Since Mom he’s been trying to stay home every time his dad’s there to see him. He’s sat in the living room instead of his bedroom three nights this week. Even talked about his day on two of those. Alas. Dad never seems that pleased. Mostly he just picks a lot of arguments and turns all the lights off at 9 and Richie ends up missing the smell of Grizzly menthols more than any boy should miss anything. 

He does go to Adam Weisshart’s poetry recital on Sunday. Mostly (/partly) because Beverly Marsh is going. She does weekend paper rounds and appears at the end of his lawn on a red Huffy Pro Thunder with California Lite Pads the morning of, shrugging her shoulders and wearing old overalls. “I wrote one about Bill. Gonna let everyone know we’re not steady anymore,” she says matter-of-factly. 

Richie takes the paper to see Simon Weisshart’s ominous grin on the front page. He’s holding one of those hydroelectric plant models you make in the eighth grade with the _PLEASE BRING HIM HOME!_ print covering his neck. “Didn’t even know you were part of the poetry club. I always figured you were more, like, a regular credible human teenager,” Richie says, itching through his pyjama pants. 

“Yeah, I never would be if I hadn’t been steady with Bill. He thought it would be muse-y for us to go together but now he’s run off to Prose & Proofreading and I’m stuck on my own pretending to give a shit about Jabberwocky. As if it wasn’t written _specifically_ for no one to give a shit about what it means. Anyhow, decided I might as well go out with a bang. It’s a tell-all poem, you could say.” Bev leans her elbow on the mailbox and wraps a lock of hair around her finger. “Are you still in band?”

“Recreationally.” 

“You gonna start coming back to practice? Amazing Grace is sounding pretty thin without your reed. Thin enough to hear Shelby Hooper on tuba.”

“Jiminy Cricket. Curse Derry for its grand total of ten townspeople that hate themselves enough to join the troupe, for real, a few more saddos and we’d have replaced her years ago.” Richie tucks his paper under his arm and pings the bell on her bicycle idly. The street is so quiet it echoes all the way down to the bottom. They chuckle at it awkwardly. “Yeah, sure, I’m coming back. Just been busy as hell. I’ll pop up sometime next week and blow Shelby out of all brutally atonal waters.” 

Bev smiles with only half of her mouth and wriggles back up onto her Huffy, a little sad-looking. Richie realises with a faint panic ‘busy as hell’ probably has something to do with mourning in her mind and not with the fact Stanley’s troll raid DND campaign has taken them every lunchtime this week to knuckle down on. Still, you’re probably not meant to tell a girl something as dorky as that anyway. And it’s probably best people do think Richie is normal enough to mourn. _And_ Bev’s already halfway down the street again, tossing Mr. and Mrs. Klipp a smudgy Simon Special of their own and calling, “blood on your pants, by the way!” 

So Richie spends the day once again tending to his devastated limbs, psyching himself up to shower (3 hours), showering (10 minutes), then trying to wind his T. Rex tape back into his player with a 3B pencil. He sees his dad for a liminal moment in the afternoon. Went’s looking a little odd in a Hawaii honeymoon t-shirt and his feet on one of those static massagers. He gives Richie nine dollars, which is initially electrifying but swiftly ruined upon him adding that it’s for a haircut only, and then he disappears off out to ‘run a few errands’. (“He just drives around,” Christine theorizes, driving Richie to school at 6. She passed her test first time and has the reaction times of an angel/terrifying hawk to prove it. “Otherwise the cupboard would be stacked by now and bathroom two would _finally_ have toilet paper. So I think he just drives around.”) 

His next liminal encounter of the day: Adam Weisshart himself. Side-splittingly, he is _exactly_ like Richie’s weed- and grief- and help-Eddie-Kaspbrak-is-in-my-house-addled brain had pictured him. He’s broad and blonde, standing up on the makeshift cafeteria stage. The kind of boy a grandmother has no need to push twelve extra helpings on because he’s already so damn rosy cheeked and healthy. Adam wears a patriots shirt tucked into high jeans, a Swatchguard, and a concentrated expression. How home grown all American boys wear their grief, apparently. Girls look tearful and puffy-eyed, guys look like they’re trying to force out a pee at the doctor’s. (Richie Toziers tick the ‘other’ box.) With his blue eyes the premium mix of tough and fragile, Adam says into the mic, “this is a poem for my little brother. It’s called Bring Him Home,” and pulls a scrap of paper out of his waistband.

Richie’s in the back row by the heater with Eddie, Bill, and Eddie and Bill’s friend Sandy Rosner. “Sandy’s cool. Sandy’s _really_ cool,” Eddie had said in this strange, ticklish tone when they’d all first piled in, nodding to the girl with the back of his head. She was color-coordinated to a T (purple plimsolls, purple skirt, purple sweater, purple ribbons - although she slacked on her stockings, which were more of a mauve pink) and was missing several teeth. Sandy had given Richie a shy little wave as if instructed and Eddie had grinned. “Wanna know something that’ll make your toes curl?” He’d hurtled. 

“Always, dude. Always.” 

Eddie clumsily leaned to put his mouth right up by Richie’s ear, shoulders squared. He smelled like pools. “She has a crush on you,” he whispered with a sort of shyness. 

Richie pulled backwards like Eddie had just taken a vampire bite out of him, feeling vaguely thunderstruck. Noticed that about himself. That all his feelings were physical, like he was struck with something, head blasted, knuckles yanked. Nothing inside. “What, she told you that? Sans brute force?” He asked loudly. 

“About five minutes before you got here. All girls ever want to talk to me about is their crushes on guys ‘cause they think it’s uniting. It’s so dangerous. I don’t even know Sandy’s middle name and now I know who she wants to have four beautiful babies and a kitten named Minky with, like, her trust was so speedily and deeply misplaced.” 

“And what did you say to her, Mr. Hull?”

“I told her I was relieved as you’re very starved of female attention, and it’s gonna take a real shit ton of bravura to break you out of your shell, as you’re a shy, vulnerable lover. Also to call you ‘cupcake-drizzle-bunny’ if you’re ever feeling down.” 

Sandy seems nice enough at least. She doesn’t appear to be much of a talker, even before Adam had started honking, “me and my little brother, bound by the love of a mother / bound by the roof of a home, now I live there alone,” like he’s Nelson Mandela over the speakers, but that’s kind of ideal. Richie likes people he can either riff off or squall at. They make him feel good about himself, in essence. 

He watches her ever-purple ribbon twist around her finger in the corner of his eye and watches Adam in the center. That same picture of his little brother from the paper’s plastered all over the front, he’s just spotted. This time it’s got a number to call and a bible verse on the footer. Must suck to be Greg Varshney. He didn’t get a gospel-reading, poetry-spewing sportstar of a brother to bring any fame to his name. Poor dude told so many fibs most people probably thought he’d somehow managed to fib himself off the face of the earth. “You think Adam speaks a little like ALF?” is Richie’s first attempt at handling things smoothly, veering his head towards Sandy to whisper at her. 

Sandy semi jumps out of her skin. “Pardon?” She whispers back. 

“You know, ALF the alien. My brother has this fucked up talking ALF doll and that’s kind of what Adam talks like. _Hello, I’m AD, from the planet Melmac-Maine, here is my bloody abortion of a poem_.” 

Slowly but surely, a blush creeps up the slope of her nose. Which is weird. Honestly, this whole thing is weird. Richie is really not at the top of any girl’s mighty pecking order of babes. Even statistically speaking, according to Greta Bowie’s official, written pecking order of babes she’d passed around at the end of grade 9 that placed him four up from the bottom (admittedly better than zero - sorry again, Martin Goodarsky.) Girls are meant to like ugly guys now but he’s not the right type. He doesn’t play the bass guitar nor does he have a British accent. His lack of manners is more genuinely upsetting than boyishly charming. Sandy must have some suicidal, harum-scarum streak behind all the pastel outfitting and the timid, “he’s...he’s talking about his dead little brother,” response she’s just given to be interested.

Richie has a rough daydream of himself patting her on the shoulder humorously. In real life he’s sitting on his hands. “Hey, don’t talk like that! Simon’s not dead, they’re gonna find him just fine,” he says. “I know these things as CEO of the fraternity of rotting relatives. Adam is a thousand percent not currently a member.” 

“Oh. O-Okay. I’m sorry about your mom though.”

“Me too. Cancer’s a bitch, huh?! A mean, nagging, passive aggressive, perpetually disappointed, ashamed, cold bitch of a bitch.” 

Sandy blinks slowly down at her own lap, pressing her fingers into her jeans. Her hair falls over her cheek in a way Richie supposes is quite pretty. Adam tries out a hackneyed rhyme of ‘police investigation’ with ‘deep excruciation’ and she murmurs, “do you wanna go somewhere and talk about it?” 

Blatantly, he doesn’t. Even though he knows it’s not really to talk about anything and it’s probably just to go and hold hands and listen to Big Star together and that that’s something on some level he thinks he might have always wanted or at least been curious about. He just doesn’t. But of course, he still says, “sure, it’s gotta beat this.” They slip out the fire exit when Adam’s bowed off the stage in a gale of the manliest possible alternative to tears (sighing very hard several times and stooping when he walks - seems more like a Grandpa Munster impression than anything else) and has started on the manliest possible alternative to making out with Eddie (several coyly exchanged arm pats), who still finds time to mouth an exaggerated _GOOOOO GET EM LULU!_ over his shoulder. Richie and Sandy’s exit is soundtracked by howling, pre-storm winds and Beverly Marsh’s voice on the mic, announcing, “this is a poem called - Barf Me Out, Billy.” 

It’s pitch black already. Richie feels like it’s been pitch black for about a week now. He walks with Sandy, who has some odd little habit of covering her mouth and nose when she walks (“I’m asthmatic. My breathing gets kind of un-delicate.”), over to the furthest chainlink of the staff parking lot. There’s a beech for him to lean against. Wishes he had a cigarette to pop out of his pocket and twiddle like he’s the Rebel Without A Cause. Instead, lamentably, he’s got a Yomega. “I’m pretty good at yo-yoing,” Sandy says once she’s permitted to breathe clean air again. “What’s that word for when your fingers are light and can move fast?”

“Dexterous,” Richie says, wrapping the string around his wrist. 

“No, the simpler word.”

“Nimble.”

“Yeah. My fingers are really nimble.” She looks at the free swatch of tree trunk, and then at her clean, fluffy sleeves, and decidedly just hugs herself. Sandy looks different in the dark. Her blonde hair is violet blue now and her face is airbrushed into a whirlpool. Somehow that makes being around her much easier. “Do you wanna talk about how you’re feeling? Or anything? Most of my friends have been saying that you’re really going through it.” 

Richie has to hold back a chimpanzee giggle. Bingo. Boys who cry really _do_ get all the action now. Roll on, nineties. “Um. They have?” He says with a barely steady voice. 

“Tanya McNeely said you broke down crying in politics last week, when Mrs. Bendixen started talking about commie stuff. Apparently she said ‘mother Russia’ and you just became inconsolable all of a sudden. Oh - shoot. And now I’ve said it again. Sorry.” 

The urge to laugh is now so strong a sound like a creaking iron gate slips out from under Richie’s tongue. Sandy flinches, expecting some emotional explosion. She’s lowering herself to kneel very daintily on the ground. Shivering. Richie thinks about flopping down to join her and blowing on her knuckles or something but is distracted by a noise in the street behind them. Sounds like a flute or a pipe. “No sweat, Sandy,” he says, trying to force himself back into the talking-to-a-girl hyperdrive consciousness. “Truth be told I’m feeling pretty alright. And Tanya McNeely is actually not in my politics class. Well, I actually don’t _take_ a politics class, because if I did I probably really would cry a lot more than I currently do. Sometimes I feel a little like that Black Flag song, Nervous Breakdown, but for the most part, I’m ok.” 

Sandy stares up at him searchingly and the flute noise gets lost in the breeze. “What part of the song?”

“You know. The part that goes ‘I’m about to have a nervous breakdown’.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.” 

She leans up to give him a gentle little ‘there there’ pat but she’s too far down and only makes it to his knee. Right on the prone-to-bleeding patch, too. It’s actually kind of painful. “I have to be honest with you, Richie Tozier,” Sandy says, because when being romantic you always use the full name. Fortunately she doesn’t know his first name’s shortened. _Richard_ has a habit of mercilessly killing all sense of whimsy. “You don’t...you don’t really act like it. I don’t mean to say you’re lying. Just that you probably hide it super amazingly.” 

Her innocence makes Richie kind of want to spill his guts on her. There’s a reckless pang in his stomach, as he slides down the tree and lets the bark nick and stain his back. “Wrong again, unfortunately, doctor Sandy. I just have this kind of difficulty with, like,” he gambles, starting to enjoy the sound of his own voice too hard. “Like, the fact that I didn’t really know my mom. When my hamster Nippy died of one hundred percent natural causes a few years ago as I mourned him I thought of all the times we had, changing his bedding, spinning his stupid little wheel for him. Accidentally dropping him inside the radiator one time but giving him so many delectable sunflower seeds after I fished him out again. But if you don’t really know somebody, what’s there to think back on when they’re gone?” 

Sandy itches through her half-ponytail, stars winking on her pearly nails. She shuffles a little closer to him now he’s down. “I don’t understand. Didn’t you live with your mom?” 

“All my life, yeah. She still just never knew me and I never knew her so it’s kind of like she died before I was born. I can’t even be angry at her for it. Because technically I wasn’t born. I still haven’t been born.” 

“How can you not be born when you’re sitting and talking to me?” 

“I don’t know.” 

She’s so close their knees are touching now, total Debbie Gibson look on her face. A ‘lay it all on me, sad boy’ expression, ‘come on, you can cry on me, I’ll hold you, I’ll still think you’re a big strong man’. Richie is so badly zoinked out by this he almost recoils. Something terrible has hit the core of his stomach like a tuning fork in a toaster, like how those bleeding, twitching chicken dinners in Eraserhead made him feel. But now the top half of her is coming closer, too. Sandy’s leaning in to kiss him. You can tell she’s never kissed before. Her lips aren’t puckered into that telephone shape Tiger Beat so religiously recommends, rather just kind of hanging open. Richie can see all the gaps in her gums and her wobbling, alien tonsils. He wants to put his tongue on this about as much as he wants to put it on poor Jack Nance’s wailing alien. 

Then there’s the glorious, glorious light of a torch shining between their faces. Richie turns just as Sandy’s about to seal the deal and has never in his life been so happy to see a _cop_. Officer Nell, no less. He’s looming in the vice principal’s parking spot and squinting at them. “Janey Mac! It’s a peeping piggy!” Richie squawks, with the most embarrassing, wobbly locution known to man, but a lot of heart. Sandy falls momentarily onto her side in the shock of it all. 

Officer Nell sticks his little gray cat teeth out. “Excuse me, young man, young lady. Please try to spend the rest of your night someplace grown-ups can see you.” 

“It’s okay, Mr. Nell. Unless this year’s killer really likes haikus and sixteen year olds’ three-hankie feelings this place is a safe zone.” 

He jerks the torch off Sandy, as she straightens herself up and combs the dirt off her stomach with swimming eyes, and onto Richie. Despite being literally spotlighted by a law enforcement officer, Richie’s feeling like a free man. He rubs his burned eyes with his thumbs and smiles. “Oh, Lord. It’s you,” Nell says, the flute noise re-emerging but getting immediately swallowed again by his booming Irish diction. “I know you. You...you cocksure little thief.” 

Richie has to wad a knuckle in his mouth and sink his free hand into the gravel for stability. “Pray, come again?!” 

“You’re that boy always swiping for things that aren’t yours at the Outlet. Practically gave me a hernia chasing you over all those halls and escalators.”

Oh, that old chestnut. Sandy shoots up beside him and fists the tears off her face. What a shitty run of this she’s got. Coaching Richie Tozier through his mommy issues from beyond the grade and a cop scare first kiss. To top things off, her Jordache purse has just gone thudding onto the floor. Richie grabs it for her in recompense and says, standing up himself, “it was one taco, one time, Mr. Nell. You never had a bad day and raided a Taco Viva when you were a kid?” 

The officer just shakes his head, clicking his torch off. All the poems must be finished back inside. The cafeteria is blazing bright yellow through the windows and more surreally _Cruel To Be Kind_ has just started playing on a stereo somewhere in there. “Right. Please just partner up and head on home. It’s been a hell of a night, you should be indoors, telling your parents you love them.” 

“Wait, shit, did something else happen?”

“I said head on home.”

“If something happened then it’s crucial we get every detail before doing so, officer. Any and all info on local freaks could keep us one fateful ride off ending up in one of their basements.” 

Nell lets off a genuine groan and claps his hand to the back of his head. “You shouldn’t be accepting rides from anybody you don’t know. It’s the nineties,” he says exhaustedly. “But...well...we’ve just got a hold of little Greg Varshney. Poor lad, he’s doing badly. He’s been through a lot. If you’re not in your bed within the next thirty minutes it’ll be your bruises on the...you’ll be the one with the...the bruises that we, euh, have to clean off at the station.” 

Richie’s eyebrows shoot up, looking momentarily like Bugs Bunny. That’s a first. He’d assumed whatever it was quaffing Derry kids off into darkness was letting them die there. “Did he say what happened to him?!” 

“Some sicko took him. Some complete sicko. We can’t be sure how much of it’s true, of course, but that’s the general point.” 

“Why can’t you be sure?”

“Because Varshney is...well, he’s creative. And some of the details were…”

“Were what?” 

He stands aside so they can finally scram. Sandy is so desperate to hurtle out of there she’s stood on her lilac tiptoes like a track star. “Because apparently this sicko wasn’t _human_. He scared Varshney in a couple ways that ‘weren’t human’, magic tricks more or less. And they say all this porno Hammer junk isn’t rotting everyone’s brains,” he resolves with a lick of the lips. “Now, if that’s all, _please_. Goodnight. Go home.” 

Richie’s journey home is an insult to the entire buddy system. He sprints all the way by himself and takes all the shady, pitchy streets in Derry to try and avoid the fatberg polava. Including Mrs. Shayegan’s (successful - Brucey the biggest doberman got a mystery lump removed from his side today and is currently confined to a cone) and the one Old Doozy’s bar is on (unsuccessful - random drunkard yells “whawr you up’oo kid?!” at him.) It’s all such a rush he forgets he’s still got Sandy’s purse, too. Which probably explains why Dad bug-eyes him so hard when he comes through the door. It’s strange that Went’s still up. Usually he disappears around 8 to read in his room like a grandmother and now it’s got to be at least 8:45. Even stranger he’s surrounded by cardboard boxes. There’s three on the coffee table plastered with _Olympia Sports_ logos. Richie pauses at the living room door, holding his flowery purse, feeling slightly cold inside. He thinks about starting a fight with his dad. Possibly throwing one of the boxes at the window and threatening four different forms of suicide if his dad doesn’t dump all this brand new _wrestling gear_ on the fire and say sorry several times. Only there’s a tape of Mom on the TV, wearing a gunne sax dress and nitpicking at a slice of wedding cake. So instead, he just goes upstairs. 

In all fairness this is what he’d been in such a hurry to get home for: sitting upstairs and calling Eddie, to tell him what Nell had said. Probably one of the only families in Derry to have wangled a cordless telephone. “I know Greg’s, like, a fucking moron, but disappearing for a whole week has got to change you a bit. At that point you’d just tell the police everything you can so they catch the guy, you know, that’d be all you cared about anymore,” he speeds into the mouthpiece with his feet up on the wall. The contents of Sandy’s purse lay spread on his stomach - two dollars, Lifesavers and red lipstick. “So if he says it’s not human, then come hell or high water, it ain’t human.” 

“Yeah. You’re totally right,” comes Eddie’s plinky voice.

“Then again, I guess you could say he might have been traumatized or something. When something that messed up happens to you it’s not majorly surprising if you come back from it sort of...non compos mentis. One time in Florida I slipped by the pool and thwocked my head so hard I thought I saw the pit monster from Enemy Mine staring at me in the water, like a mirage. You’ve seen Enemy Mine, right? Of course you have, fuckin’ maniac. It’s got Dennis Quaid in it.” 

“Mhm.” 

“It was Dennis Quaid you like, wasn’t it?

Silence. Richie taps his toes on his old Schoolhouse Rock calendar impatiently, neck verging on a cramp all twisted back in his bed covers. “I know the thing you’ve been hounding me about obsessively for the last six days is all of a sudden _super_ uninteresting, as is being even a little friendly with me, but -”

“Oh my god, Richie, stop. Can’t you - ?!” There’s a funny little click on the speaker like Eddie’s just accidentally sat on it. Then a classic sigh. “No, I’m sorry. This is all major. I wanna talk about it really bad but I’m gonna call you back and do that later, okay?” Richie flips a page up to November. The same _I’m Just a Bill_ graphic he swears it was back in September, too. He wants to grill Eddie some more or at least express his great condemnation of all this, perhaps call him a flake or a fuckwad or something else along those lines, but he’s interrupted by another warping sound effect. Which in turn makes him want to ask if Eddie’s playing Olympic frisbee with his house phone. The bit wouldn’t have any real gut to it though, ‘cause he can tell what this sound is. It’s a kiss. 

So he shuts the phone off and boomerang throws it at the carpet. The back falls off and the batteries slump out. And Richie falls asleep staring at them with a fist stuffed in his mouth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> okay so i’m realising that last time I updated i was so nervous i forgot to mention all the things id usually like to footnote a fic with so: here is a [soundtrack](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2dS04xu3jNinC7PKm8win6?si=6pYk1y9OSHSPnYhLvQyuGw) for this story and [all the directly referenced songs artists and themes](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0AnxDgJr7H3cGIzYrRHhQn). also happy new year ;B 
> 
> sorry i feel like this took a bazillion years even though it’s before the update time. i had coronavirus while writing the first half of it and then was very stoned/generally insane for the other half and rewrote this a grand total of three times. still not happy with it. i promise there ARE slasher and horror elements in this fic eventually, despite what all the blathering slice of life might suggest. 
> 
> explaining all the references and cultural bits here was too long for ao3 so I wrote them out and put some links to check out at tebrefs.carrd.co . if youre curious about anything or see where ive gotten something wrong though feel free to comment
> 
> edit: i may take extra long to update next as i kind of want to hammer out both last chapters and post them at the same time so i don’t get too in my head about them but we will see! bye!!


	3. My Life Is Starting Over

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning for a lot of death related stuff, (bordering on) gore descriptions, suicide references, internalised issues re gender, poor body image/fatphobia and just generally period typical commentary

I saw a monster on the Flour Mill bridge  
I asked it to leave me alone  
He was red  
I think he was European  
He said ‘this is my home’

Stephie Pasternack, class 3, Derry Elementary 

-

Merle is pretty damn gullible for a guy that looks like he hasn’t slept since the seventies. Or, well, maybe that’s why he’s so gullible. He’s had his cheek propped on his chewed up fist for so long both appendages are turning purple and there’s a drool stain right between the Bike Shop (unlike the Shoppe, actually for bike sales) logo and Merle nametag on his shirt. He hasn’t even looked away to switch at the shop stereo. Real Gone Kid has earned itself five whole loops. If you’re weathering the Richie Tozier totally disrupting your work day storm this hard you must have believed him when he told you you’d get something out of it. 

“I don’t know, man...I don’t know,” Merle says in a barely awake voice. He looks like a cardboard printout with the mouth part cut out and some schmuck talking through it. “I’ve heard bad things about this stuff. Where’d you say you’re from again?” 

Richie is positively bristling in his shaker knit sweater. He passes his soda to Patty Blum, bops his hip to a little Deacon Blue and lays his hands in a basket shape on the countertop to talk business. “I’m with you, Merle. Too many kids with bricks making our profession look like a party game these days. It’s P.C.S.C, Penobscot County Safe Cycling, I can give you a minute if you want to go check us out in the yellow pages. I can also parrot a bunch of the most thorough reviews we’ve gotten. Our boss, you know, he likes to make us parrot the best reviews. Like Flat Tire Flyer, last year they described our procedure as slick, our security measures as rock solid, and general customer experience as positively _orgasmic_. Freestylin’ went on in February to really shoot its load over -” 

“No - no, you can stop, you’re fine. This your old man’s business? He send you out today?”

“It’s the government’s. America’s. Earth’s, even.” 

He subconsciously stands on his tiptoes as Merle gives him an undead once-over and Patty, never a born businesswoman, dreamily clicks a handlebar light on the display rack. She’d told Richie she was coming out in one of her NAF NAF boiler suits with the buttons on that are meant to look rocky and instead look kind of secretary-y but she’s just wearing dungarees. The same ones Mr. Sauver got her dress coded for last month. (Apparently if you wear them with one strap it’s got, like, gang affiliations or something. Now she slips the left one down every non-Sauver-occupied second of her life. Nobody’s convinced she’s a mobster yet.) As if Richie hadn’t very clearly asked her to look _cosmopolian_ on the phone earlier. School is shut for the week and the only prospective plans God had dealt him on his first day free had been to wreak havoc in a cycle store with Patty or watch Three Men and a Baby for the fourth time with his dad. So he’d called her at the crack of dawn. 

(In all honesty he’d originally gone for the second option ‘cause it meant he didn’t have to put clean clothes on. This had turned out to be more of a challenge than just a nice thing to do.)

(“Look really close when Ted Danson’s hanging with that lady and she’s getting the baby out of the crib and cuddling it and stuff, Dad, ‘cause you can see a ghost. There’s this little boy just standing in the curtains behind them and staring. Apparently the house only got made into a movie house because the parents that used to live there’s kid shot himself and him popping up in this is his way of being like, fuck you Mom and Dad. Personally I feel like it was just a hazy marketing stunt. Even in death I don’t think I’d appear in Three Men and a Baby so, like, you can’t really say it couldn’t use the help. Looks fucking spooky though.” 

Wentworth, who’s seen every episode of Cheers, and thinks everything Ted Danson touches turns to gold, took his glasses off. “Sometimes, Richie, you can just watch things. Would it kill you to just watch things?” He sighed, switching out the lamp.)

Being the only _cosmopolitan_ person in this joint, combed hair and carpenter pants and all, he’s sort of working alone. And so he’s on his tiptoes. “Part one of the survey is pretty straightforward. Health & Safety stuff. Has anyone ever suffered major injury, trauma and or died at Bike Shop? ” Richie asks with a hinky little fingernail drum on the counter. 

“Some kid got his noggin caught in the sliding door once but he only got a headache. Cried for a bit. His parents told him not to have been playing with the door in the first place and then they left with a BSA Panther,” Merle says, scratching his unshaven chin gingerly and spacing out a second. An exclusive marvel of Derry culture: when you ask people here this question, they actually have to think about it. 

“Probably just a dumbfuck kid.” 

“R-right.” 

“If anyone suffered major injury, trauma and or died outside of Bike Shop but needed Bike Shop’s support would you do the Christian thing and offer it to them?” 

Patty has drifted her way to the helmet rack. Merle pauses to look at her as the toggles on the Li’l Bell Shell she’s toying with give an ominous snap. Usually people around here are born good girls or bad eggs like cartoon characters but Patty’s a total glitch; the spelling bee Star Trek dork you wouldn’t trust with your kids or fine China. “I’m not sure I follow. We aren’t really a hospital....medical environment,” Merle mumbles as he forces his eyes away. “I’m a Christian though. Technically. What did you say I get for all this again?” 

“If you complete the survey and we grade your results ‘outstanding’ or higher then you get thirty free Lotus 108s - literally a super bike, first monocoque frame since the ban, least wind resistance ever seen yet - plus Stanley Uris is gonna come to your store and take a bunch of pictures with everyone. I won’t insult your intelligence introducing him because I’m sure if you take your job seriously you know who world hour record holder Stanley Uris is, and you’ve cheered like a little boy for all five of his Tour de France victories, but I’ll emphasize what a big deal for you it’ll be.” 

“Well, then - um - yes, we would offer help to anybody that needs it as we have a first aid pail behind the counter and two telephones. We’ve also recently provided emotional support to a member of our team, Greg Varshney, by adding three dollars to his weekend pay after his recent trouble.” 

Bullseye. Richie giddily tips himself right over the counter like a moviestar and trumpets, “Greg _Varshney_ you say?! You’re the guy they’ve got coaching him through the comeback, huh?” with his sneakers bouncing like he’s on a spring pony. “My...boss says that when somebody goes through something insane they have to deal with it through a kind of exposure therapy. Flooding. In yours and Greg’s case you’d have to pretend to kidnap him all over again and make him eat bugs and sleep in a fish tank or something. But then when it was all over you’d have to give him a big hug, some Fudgetown cookies, show him not _all_ kidnappers want to screw him up for life...they make you do anything like that?” 

Hark - Mumbling Merle is in fact capable of locomotion. He shuffles backwards so his face is half covered by the moronic _PUT THE FUN BETWEEN YOUR LEGS!_ banner they’ve hung behind the counter and his ass touches the stereo and flips it to The King of Wishful Thinking. “Yeah. I mean, no. But Greg does help out around here sometimes, yes. A little on the young side but his dad and grandpa practically built this side of town. Someone helps him take heavy bits off the shelves,” he says warily.

Richie sticks a hand out for his soda but it’s long gone. He clumsily pretends to be swiping for one of the countertop pens instead. Presses a green marker to the palm of his hand. “Hey, you don’t know anything about Greg Varshney’s work schedule, do you? He’d make a _killer_ participant for the survey, pardon the equivoque,” he guffaws. 

Merle’s itching his stupid peach fuzz again. “Remind me who it was that hired you?”

“My dad. Hard-ass makes me do all the talking stuff for him.”

“I thought you said you were government run?” 

Richie grins with ruckled eyes. He feels like some kind of politician. Speak into the star-spangled mic, President Tozier, _read my lips: no new taxes_. Or perhaps a _my fellow Americans...we begin bombing in five minutes_ might be more his sort of thing. Perhaps he’s Roseanne Barr grabbing her privates while she saw the dawn’s early light at the Super Bowl. Oh, yeah. That’d be his sweet jingo statement. “It appears I have overwhelmed you with information, Merle. Sincerest apologies from the whole PCSC platoon. If you pass me onto Greg then maybe you can have a cola and a break.” 

Merle’s processing of this situation can be charted entirely through what he does with his mouth. Confusion = slack lips, irritation = sucking motion, realisation = tight lips, more irritation = sucking motion but slightly more gross. He mops his face, a beaten man, and says, “if you’d wanted to come in here for your high school gossip you could’ve just gone out the back, for Christ’s sake. He’s been sitting out there on his break for forty five minutes too long.”

Patty has materialised back into this plane of existence stinking of bike chain lube. “Emotional support couldn’t cover giving him the week off? Or, like, the year?!” She clacks in a balky voice - reserved for when Mrs. Douglas gets the dates wrong in history or when Richie Tozier refers to a girl as a ‘damn Joanie’. Punctuates it with a sip on said Richie Tozier’s super size soda, who (seeing as his act is temperately blown) smacks her knuckles and sends it spilling all over the lino. In a beat the pair of them are chivvied out of the store like roaches from a kitchen. 

“Told you a survey wouldn’t work,” Patty hisses, almost slipping in Blue Sky. She’s picked up some flyer while poking around. Looks kind of handmade and says something about _DERRY HALLOWE’EN HIGH JINKS_. “If you’re too nosy and weird to just read the paper about Greg the least you can do is be upfront about it.” 

Richie shrugs. “If I do things normally I die.” 

“So that’s why you walk like that.” 

Greg is a squirmy, orange-haired little raccoon of a kid. Even before all this he was one of the more distinguished teens around town. Famous for getting to sit with his rich dad on one of the floats back when the _BuckNanza_ parades were still a thing (mysteriously discontinued in ‘89. Either ‘cause of that time the winner of biggest slain buck wasn’t really slain and woke up midway through the award ceremony to infect every nearby contestant with rabies or ‘cause everyone realised the concept of a biggest slain buck contest being Derry’s most well-known custom was, like, super fucked up) and also for having met Irene Cara. In spite of his concurrent fame for lying all the time, this was 100% true. Him and his parents were in LA for the American Music Awards and camped outside the Shrine past midnight. Greg has a picture standing with her, miniskirt to boot, pinned up in his locker to prove it. 

Usually Richie would have a lot of respect for someone like him. Tricksters alliance and all. But he doesn’t. Greg is less flying in the face of the traditionalist system and more just telling the lunch queue he’s made out with all the girls in his grade, seriously, even the freaky ones. Richie always heard rich kids just can’t make trouble the same. (Ignoring the fact his own dad’s a pediatric dentist. Off topic. Not important.) “Tell me, Greg,” he says, looming over the threshold of the staff patio. “Would you say you’re a Dagger or a Ramp Local?”

Greg stares at him cautiously. He’s in the middle of a frontside 180 on his skateboard despite the fact his wrist is in a sling. “That movie sucks,” he says in a wet voice. 

“That’s actually the right answer. It sucks so bad, like, holy Toledo, Josh Brolin’s mom is gonna leave him thirty bucks for the entire summer vacation and he’s not even gonna be pissed off with her about it? And what’s all the fucking face paint about? Is this Venice Skate Park or Gary Numan’s birthday party?!” Richie has his specs pushed up into his bangs for the sake of anonymity. Measures for a second rate boy - that lopsided crush of _distinguished teen around town_ and _nobody at all_. “Then again, non-skater point of view. I think skating is for sissies so it was probably a bust the second I got to the theatre.”

“No way is it for sissies. Coach Black said my quads and core are the strongest he’s ever seen in _any_ boy my age, even when he worked in Chicago, and that’s from skateboarding alone.”

“How totally not uncomfortable of him.” 

“Aren’t you that guy that had the thing with the dive board? And the pool noodle?”

“No, I graduated. But curiously one of my strongest memories from Derry High is the last physical I ever had. Coach, bless his heart, when he was weighing me up he said I had ‘the physical state of a Suzie Q cake’. I still don’t have half a clue what that means, Greg. Although...” 

Richie stretches a wicked arm out to hold it against Greg’s like they’re little girls exchanging friendship bracelets. Same size. Greg recoils. “Fuck away from me, Diveboard!” He piggy squeals, nursing his sling. Richie yanks his sweater down again and gulps back a cackle. Sometimes a _hey, look how hideous I am!_ is the only rag you need. “Keeping your muscle mass up when you go through toxic shock syndrome and a horse riding accident _and_ a kidnapping in one year isn’t exactly easy, you know.” 

Two of those things practically have _SHIT ON ME, RICHIE, SPREADJA CHEEKS AND SHIT ON ME!_ neon labels in barred Blade Runner font on them but only one is what Richie’s looking for. “So the kidnapper had you lay around in the dark and not work out and eat nachos all week, then. Some version of him in another life kind of sounds like my type of guy.”

Greg looks grossed out. He performs an indignant little skid back onto his board. Patty comes around the corner with fresh Blue Sky from Hannaford. “You can’t say things like that, you asshole,” he blusters. “There’s...there’s some real fucked up things going on here and you making fun of it is just a mortal sin.” 

“I’m waiting until I have a good few other mortal sins under my belt before I repent. Only want to have to make one trip. Gas prices are just...how do you mean fucked up? It was religious?” 

“It was _Satanic_. Worse than anything anyone says goes on in small towns...living in fucking devil worship county.”

“I don’t think devil worship’s around much anymore.”

“Yeah, the worshippers, maybe. Not the devil himself.” Greg stares at Patty’s pink Hannaford bag with his eyes crossed. Looks more like he wants to put it over his head until he suffocates than grab an egg sandwich from inside. Richie hasn’t seen a look as dark as that since he last saw his maternal grandmother, back in ‘90. His dad was meant to drive them all the way to Connecticut so they could spend their first good Christmas as a family after the whole gastroesophageal debacle but mom had the shits too bad to even make it onto the interstate. She smelled like a horse and couldn’t sit upright. What morphine / the all-blotting umbrella of death overhead does to ladylike women. When Dad had explained to Grandma that night she’d been standing under these stupid red reindeer fairy lights on the doorstep, damn retirees, they’d always had time to decorate big down there, and her face had looked so warped and disgusted and morbid Richie thought she might snap and kill them all. He’d stopped thinking about it these days, but Greg right now makes him feel he might want to draw the expression again. Just looks all screwed up. 

Blinking really hard, Richie goes on, “the papers were saying you thought it was a phantom. My neighbours, the Klipps, said you said it was Pinhead.” 

Greg flushes red. “It was something in that category.”

“How do you know?”

“You know how Pinhead doesn’t look right? Because he’s all white and has...like...pins in his head? Well my guy was like that but in different ways. He didn’t even have any legs.”

Although Patty’s the mystery horror aficionada of the group, her first contribution in all this is, “my omie’s missing a leg ‘cause a wardrobe fell on it. She was trying to reach for her hat on the top and it all just dumped. Wears a wooden one now.”

“Not that kind of missing legs,” he crackles with frustration. “They weren’t treated or however you call it. They were literally bloody and bony. Like someone had hacked them off right before he came in there, no cauterization, nothing, plus a bunch of other gashes. Made me think of a living corpse.”

“How could a guy that janked up put your arm in a sling?” Richie asks amidst suckles on his fresh soda.

Greg sticks a finger up in a ‘don’t get me started’ kind of way. “He didn’t give me this. This is from when I escaped. He had this whole thing about always making me eat with a spoon even if the food he gave me wasn’t spoon-eat-able at all...carrots and bread and shit. One time he took me out of the attic, ‘cause that’s where he kept me, the attic, and put me in the back of his van or whatever to go someplace without realising I had all my spoons with me. Shoelaced ‘em together like a jemmy and got the back doors open. Didn’t see the license plate by the time I picked myself up off the damn road but...besides the point. The point I was gonna make is that even the other stuff he did, he _never_ seemed janked up. It’s like he didn’t even know he was hurt.”

Patty says, “your dad ought to get you a wicked good therapist. They don’t really do it here but I think there’s a guy in Coaldown,” before Richie can ask _well what’s the other stuff he did?!_

“Don’t need to go _that_ far. I wanna stay off work though.” 

“You legit just said you were held captive in a living corpse’s attic and forced to eat bread with a spoon.” 

“Well, you know what they say. There’s no use being a big girl about it. Now I’m just putting all my energy into the police investigation. Catching and killing that zombie’s all I need to feel better.”

If Richie ever tried to digest anything at church he might be saying a little prayer for Greg right now. Derry has this bizarro curse going on where whenever things get better on a global scale they get three times worse for people around here. Like how within days of the government deciding they’d cough up a few basic civil rights for disabled folk earlier this year Junie Benson got her wheelchair tipped _and_ her flower pot skirt pulled down in the same lunchtime. The lunch ladies wouldn’t even replace her spilt pot pie. Baby Jessica got pulled out of that well in the 80s and Mr. McBride died in that unmarked swamp while his kids watched the CNN coverage. Just the same, as everyone had gotten very interested in busting serial killers and kid snatchers, Derry city council couldn’t even catch a rat. Literally, they couldn’t. Beefsteak Charlie’s will still be crawling with them after Charlie himself is a tombstone.

Alas. All of that is very depressing and probably more than a little biased and nothing a mentally fractured fifteen year old should be thinking about. “I’ve got one last question for you, Varshney. If you answer candidly I’ll go and tell Merle you threw up. Maybe even toss you a sandwich or two,” Richie says instead, offering his soda like a ceasefire. 

Greg looks suspicious but more so just confused. He stuffs the bottle under his jacket. “Alright then.”

“You see the guy’s face? Think he lives here?”

He drags a sneaker over his skateboard thoughtfully. “I saw something where a face should have been, alright,” he mumbles. “A nose in there, maybe. Couple of ears. But mostly it was all just hair. His head, his neck, all of it, all covered in black hair.”

-

Patty’s mom’s gonna pick her up from outside the video store. The place has got everything; Wayne’s World cutouts three times bigger than the average man, rotting possum on the curb, sweet, delicate purr of drain construction down the way. Patty holds her finger in her ear while she talks on the phone and Richie inspects the resident furry cadaver. “Outside Viddy-Home, Mom, I said _Viddy-Home_! No, Richie’s not coming with me. Yes, I’m definitely sure he’s not.”

The possum’s arms are all out on the crook ‘cause of what looks like a mack truck. All animals stupid enough to crawl out of the state forest and check these parts out die that way, or under Jamie Rothsfarb’s Mini Metro (the cops had warned him he legally couldn’t drive until his mom could afford him specs, but then had to arrest his mom for stealing fifteen bottles of cough syrup from her own Kroger shift the following evening, so it had become a kind of gray area.) “You’re so fucking lucky you’ve got a cell, you know. I’m not gonna be able to get a cell until I get to college,” Richie soughs over his shoulder.

Patty, who hates being whispered at while she’s on the phone more than anything, gives him an acerbic look. “Even Stevens then. I have a cell but probably won’t be able to go to college.” 

“Why not?” 

“Already retaking junior year. By the time I’m done with all this I’m gonna need to have an apartment and a baby,” she says in her I’m-much-older-than-you voice. Before Richie has a chance to explode over this statement she’s got the speaker back on her ear. “Yes Mom, I ate. No, I’m not screaming at you, there’s just construction everywhere and I’m having to kind of strain to...okay. I told you he’s not coming. See you in ten.” Patty stuffs her cell in her backpack and leans her cheek against Wayne’s colossal forearm. “God. Hard work much.” 

Richie brushes down his carpenters, hopping to join her. “Thought you and your mom were Thelma and Louise or something,” he says. 

“As in we shoot people?”

“As in you’re joined at the hip. Also Louise only shoots that guy ‘cause he’s a giant piece of shit. Either sense is mostly very complimentary.” 

“Nobody is genuinely close with their mom, Richie. I’d rather yank my own leg hairs out or...or wear Pasta to school than go on another ice cream run with mine ever in my life but I’d also rather keep her bitching about the choco-flake consistency than about, like, me.” Patty hugs herself as a breeze hits. Dungarees are coolest with nothing but your vest under, reputedly. Although whoever wrote that rule probably did so in the middle of July. Drinking iced tea on their Floridian porch. A couple of girls on rollerblades come by in matching Angora sweaters and she stares after them with a look of yearning. “Fuck. I bet those girls are warm. I bet they’re not gonna catch a fever from standing out in the cold pretending Greg Varshney got tortured by a limbless werewolf all day.” 

“You’re the only friend I’ve got who’s clued up on mystery-solving, dude. You watch Twin Peaks. You’ve got the little necklace and everything.” He pauses a beat. “Did you say you have leg hair?”

Patty groans like she ate something bad. “Doesn’t mean I think anything like that could happen in real life. Throwing me into the mix ‘cause I like TV is like...I don’t know...Dan Quayle rocking up to Latin America ‘cause he ‘studied Latin at school’.”

“Trish. Please don’t just say things like ‘Dan Quayle’. It really screws with my equilibrium.” Life is apparently just a long, sticky series of standing next to shivering girls and wondering how to be with that, Richie muses. He might give her his sweater if A) he weren’t wearing piece two of his horrible eczema-friendly underwear (belly bleeds now, too. Discovered around ten minutes after his report card came in the mail. Before Dad could even lick his thumb for the comportment page Richie had been gore-soaked and bemoaning his ‘brand new eating disorder’) and B) being mean to Patty wasn’t his whole schtick. It’s probably worth thinking about _why_ that’s his whole schtick. Especially when being selfish and cruel are usually more traps he falls into while this is all very volitional. Maybe he’s got a crush on her. “You think you could ever butter your mom up hard enough for her to buy you an Angora?” 

She almost sends Mike Myers flying into Dana Carvey in a romantic heap on the ground trying to finger tease her pigtails. “Hopefully before this year ends. You see the ads? They all say they’re essential for going on dates ‘cause they feel so strange. Even if you’re a total pig the guy will still have motive to touch you.”

“What guy are you going on dates with?”

“All the teens are doing it, dontcha know.” 

“Yeah but what guy?” Richie pushes, as he’s a pro at this. Bop (item 2 in his female condition treasury) reports that ninety four percent of guys say talking about girls with actual girls is ‘a surefire cringe-o-rama’ alongside a print of River Phoenix as if he’s one of the aforementioned guys. Richie thinks River’s got it all wrong, though. Girls’ acrolect around guys is really very low intensity.

“Well, you know. Stan and I have got to start being something soon,” she says slowly. “If he ever stops being a pussy and asks if we can be something, I mean. In toto I don’t date pussies.”

“You guys are definitely something. I been thinking about that at the moment. This place is a pissed-in diaper and it used to make me feel like we all don’t exist but, when I’m biking through here now, I always think about how sad it’d be to live somewhere like Los Angeles where everything cool you do instantly is lost in, like, this huge terrible sea of cool. You and Stanley are sixteen and haven’t even kissed yet and even you two are never getting lost in the sea of cool.” 

“Was getting at something way less existential, but. Wow.”

“Sorry. I meant to say screw you for making me into a little spare part pet monkey but good luck I guess.” 

“You’ll live, Rich. You’re a middle child. A middle child by four hours.” There’s a small commotion across the road. Mrs. Blum’s wagon is here. The only problem is she’s not driving towards Patty but rather has halted herself by the construction to yell at all the workers. Some dropout in a high vis is getting told to gargle his own pipe wrench. “Plus, that’s ironic coming from you. As if you didn’t hurt Stan’s feelings for so long being all obsessed with Arie.” 

Richie sticks his whole fist through a hole Bev Marsh’s dog put in his pants and wriggles his nose at her. “When was that again?”

“You know. When Stan was really sad ‘cause you think the sun shines out of Arie’s ass, like, he even cried. He said he could forgive Arie for stealing all his GPKs and his TCTs but never for stealing his best friend.”

He’s about to make a joke about Arie selling him out from under his jacket to local kids for lollipops and Braindead tickets but that may just make this all much more disturbing. (Important distinction - good disturbing: attic werewolf, truck possum, that time Richie played his Bumbling Boxers over Christine’s pillow while she was sleeping and watched the little guy in blue wind right inside her ear. Bad disturbing: everyone being very upset over his apparent letch for friend’s brother.) Also Mrs. Blum’s car has pulled up. Next thing Patty is leaping in the car in a flash of red Hannaford lettering, then driving off for ice cream.

Richie stays to watch the video store TV through the window a while. They’re playing some weird old David Letterman rewind, back from when people thought he was ‘anti-establishment’ and a threat to Johnny Carson’s good name. After his R&B dancing incident as a kid the TV at home was bust for the summer so he used to come here a lot. He’d head out after his parents left for work with a couple sodas, just in time for Misfits Of Science and some raunchy car commercials. A few homeless guys would always have the same idea. Mom got weird when she found that out. Saw too many PSAs. Richie liked those guys, though. They were old and funny, and had this obsession with the dog in Punky Brewster. Every time an episode preview ran they’d go, “where’s Brandon? Where’s Brandon?!” The Richie of 1992 snorts under his breath at the memory. He draws a dog on his palm with coveted Bike Shop marker then runs home.

Well, home with one stop: Eddie’s house. A little effort at the Art of Caring About Things People Tell You reminds Richie that if it’s a Monday, Eddie should be at his dad’s. Which happens to be right on the way. So he figures this day ought to have _some_ purpose.

Ten minutes later Eddie is out on his porch with a toothbrush sticking out of his mouth and that same Top Gun shirt from the woods, only now it’s cut in half. His belly-button is staring Richie down like a fuckin’ third eye. “Oh, man,” he says through a mouthful of Great Zeeth. “You remember where I live?!” 

Richie leans a twitchy arm on the porch railing. This place is a little bigger than Mrs. Kaspbrak’s, with a dopey orange cat on the doorstep. “Got beamed over here in a trance, Mr. Murphy. I figured a kind of anniversary effect. On this day four years ago I was made to play that game with the knife and the fart contest or something.” 

Eddie pops his toothbrush out. “You wanna not talk about Fart Dart while my dad’s inside?”

“Fart is _not_ a curse word.” 

“It could be in Ladino. Or Turkish.”

“Don’t you mean Yiddish?”

“Nah. Read a book.” He sighs, turning to stroke his cat as though switching off an alarm. When Eddie gets pissed off he for some reason also gets really into snappy little chores. If you poke him in the side long enough he’ll just stand up and start taking everyone’s snack + pop orders. “Did you show up with any kind of human conversation in mind Richie? Or are we good to go? ‘Cause I’ve got, like, a ton of plans.” 

“Hey, snap,” Richie bluffs. “Wanted to bring you up to speed on something is all. Me and Patty were just in town playing good cop bad cop with Greg Varshney. Originally titled good cop brutally disinterested cop but edited for concision.” 

Eddie’s eyes light up. He’s good at keeping his face straight, though. Should be a stand-up comedian or a doctor who tells people that tumour ain’t going away. “Cop. Gross.”

“Don’t worry, we weren’t playing like the bad kind. I was channelling more those clowns on Cop Rock. _Crime never sleeps so stay awake, lets be careful out th-eeee-re!_ ”

“I’m a hundred percent they’re still the bad kind. Both as oppressors and network TV skits.” 

Richie sticks his arms up sorely. “What about...I don’t know...NYPD Blue?” 

“Also bad but not because it’s ‘pornographic’ or whatever those old lady protesters say,” Eddie says as if excerpted. “Just ‘cause they expect us to get all woolly over a bigot guy main character. My dad cried that episode where he freaked out and punched down the door. _Cried_. That’s what ABC’s got us feeling for bigots now.” 

The cat pads out to sniff Richie’s Hanes, which is a very distracting level of cute. Its big, orange nose is rubbing kisses all over his ankles. He gives it a pat on the butt. Frank Kaspbrak’s bald head appears in the shadows of Eddie’s hallway. The guy balks at both boys over his shoulder, blasting vacuum in tow. “Eddie,” Frank picks first. “Why is the...what are you wearing?” 

The side of Eddie’s mouth crooks up. “Crop shirt, doy. It’s what footballers wear. What do you think?” 

Frank looks at him soberly. If it were Went he’d probably say something about it being what _queers_ wear, because everyone says that. “You know it’s freezing outside right? Down at work they’re not going to let the children on the playground at lunch next week because when they did on Friday little Joey Greeley’s knees went indigo. Indigo, Eddie.” 

“Don’t be a square, Dad. Joey probably went crawling around in wet mud and not even looking a little fresh while doing it. I, however, have jeans on. And if my hands touch the floor I have a panic attack. And I look really, really fresh.” Eddie dumps his shoulders against the wall and pushes his belly out. His funny little frame performing this with such pep while still looking so gravely self-conscious is something out of a Charlie Chaplin feature. “Plus, above all, I’ve got an outie. All the fashion brains practically _beg_ you to wear these if you’ve got an outie.”

No denying, he’s got a pretty impressive outie. Now in stunning 3D. Frank has a fond look growing on his face. He clicks the vacuum off before it eats their National Lampoon’s doormat. “I don’t think I ever understand a thing you’re saying,” he putters. 

“Basically I’ll be fine, please don’t worry, everyone wears these.” 

“In the summer time I’m sure. You won’t be able to join in with all that though. Because by then your stomach will be _indigo_.” 

Richie, who has been slouching on the horizon and trying to figure out how all this cat hair made it to his mouth, says, “I can vouch. As someone whose stomach is being ravaged by three or four different skin disorders at the moment I know you should always prioritize keeping it the right color. They should make a PSA for it. One of those nightmare-mania ones like I’m Always Chasing Rainbows. ‘I do coke so I can work longer to earn more to do more coke’ but it’s ‘I get more hypo…’, no, ‘I wear more crop shirts so I can get more hypothermia so I can’...yeah. It’d be necessarily terrifying.” Frank shuffles from slipper to slipper as he takes this in. Left for ‘who the fuck is that?’, right for ‘what the fuck is he talking about?’. Once both feet are steady he starts looking gently grim. 

“Well, isn’t that funny. Rowdy Richard all tall and old,” he says, squinting. 

“What’s up Mr. Kaspbrak. Yeah, my face is getting saggy. Now people call me rowdy Richard ‘cause of how my knees sound when I get up.” Richie means to wave but apparently does a thumbs up instead. Stupidus reflexus, how chirpy. 

“Listen. I was really, really sorry to hear about your mom, Richie. So sorry I cried for you a bit.”

“What, you’re the one that pushed her off her perch?”

Eddie chuckles generously/in terror to give his dad time to recalibrate. “I…” Frank starts, then gives up on forming any fleshly reaction to this. “She was a really awesome lady. I didn’t see her much but I know she must have been, to raise a really awesome boy. Shouldn’t lose mothers. There’s just no sense to be made of anything like that.” 

Whenever somebody says this to Richie he gets stuck halfway between those old berserk urges to make merry and, like, a sort of obsession. That’s the only change in all this since last week, probably. He could write about it in the notebook Kelsch swears is gonna make him a treehugger. _DEAR MISSUS, I STILL DONT FEEL THINGS ABOUT MY DEAD MOM BUT NOW I FIND HER DEAD-NESS RIVETING. I WISH I COULD HAVE SEEN HER CORPSE BECAUSE I WANT TO DRAW IT HAHAHH RICHIE_. Diving for the easier end of the fake emotional spectrum, Richie goes for a, “thanks, sir. Her send-off was really great. Our neighbors bought all the good snacks.”

Something that sounds like a shitty rock band in one of the street’s garages starts rumbling. The antsy cat flops on its belly. “That’s nice, Richard. That’s really nice,” Frank says with a finger in one ear. “Right, well. I’m a scatter-brain. Tidying up one minute, chatting your ear off the next. Were you two about to head out?”

“No, Eddie’s going to-”

“I’m meeting my friends, Dad, remember?” 

From the look of Frank’s face he definitely doesn’t remember. Doesn’t mind either though. He nods and goes to scoop the cat up one-armed but Eddie gets there first. He goads his dad back off into the house in a plume of orange fur. “God. Sorry. He sleeps half the day so whenever he wakes up he gets hyper-talkative.”

Richie throws his foot up on the railing to fidget at his laces. On particularly stressful days he’ll get home and look down and they’ll be octo-knotted. “Didn’t know he works at Scary Elementary now,” he hums. 

“Got laid off. He keeps in touch with all his old janitor buddies, though, they tell him fuckin’ everything. I said he needs to ask them to stop telling him because if not he’ll never get over it and never find another job and Mom’ll wrangle him out of custody. But he doesn’t. I think both of my parents are just huge gossips.” 

“I’m on the same page as your dad. The ethos over at that place is all about kicking decent, solid guys to the curb.”

“Principal Rousseau sent you home that time ‘cause you swallowed a Fairy Winkle and went purple. Please don’t go joining any unions.” The band is into its swing enough now to make out it’s some Metallica song. Eddie, half his face buried in cat, starts swaying to it a little. If you squint down the way hard enough you can spot the garage it’s coming from ‘cause there’s a skull and crossbones sprayed on the auto-doors. “Kind of lucky you’re here, actually. Before I hit the bus station I wanted to give you something.”

Richie can’t listen to this sort of music without thinking of when Stew Dubinski used to babysit him. He’d bang his head to these songs and offer dinnertime conversations about ‘when that bitch takes her bra off in Flashdance’. Eddie gropes for something in the bit of hunter green hallway Richie can’t see. “Bus station? I thought you were gonna see Adam?” 

“No. I’m meeting friends from New York.” Eddie doesn’t give him a chance to ask how on earth you get friends in New York. Doesn’t really need to. The sixteen year old Eddie has this kind of worldly way about him. Still a massive fucking dork but if he ever got out of here God probably wouldn’t suck him back in. He pops back into view, ruching his cheek against the doorframe. He’s holding up a special edition tape of _An American Werewolf In London_. “Tah-diddly-dah. Dad found it and told me to throw it out because it’s ‘cyprian’, whatever that is.” 

Richie takes it and flips to read the back cover in spite of his own voice gobbing, “I’ve seen this about twenty five times. I told you. I love John Landis.”

“Do you own it?”

“Stan does.”

Eddie wriggles his fingers to mean ‘there ya go’. He makes one last lunge for the keys at the bottom of the staircase, stored under a brass Bambo Beaver figurine. (Derry doesn’t have a whole lot of history about guys being good so someone in the council had made up Bambo as the town’s cream of crop. He’s meant to be a magic beaver that blesses streams and hard workers and stuff.) “Well, now you do too. The main guy reminds me of you, all the way. Decent face -” swipes a finger over Richie’s nose, “- terrible jaw -” flicks him in the chin. “I thought you could rewatch to get in the zone for our investigation and then I’ll pick you up tonight.” 

Richie glowers at Eddie’s finger cross-eyed for a few seconds like he’s thinking about biting it. “My dad wants a boys’ night. Plus I can’t let you pick me up and actually sit in a little car and drive it. That would just be too funny. My kidneys would explode.” He flicks his head. “Double plus, _you’re_ the one that needs to zone-ify. I’ve been investigating all morning.” 

“Oh, hey, that’s exactly what we should talk about when I pick you up tonight. I’ll get you off old Wentworth’s hands, just look out for me, wolf. _Beware the moon_!” 

-

While Frank Kaspbrak is in jammies at 2, Wentworth Tozier is in ironed work gear at 6, which feels like two ends of a there’s-something-terribly-wrong-with-my-dad spectrum. Wentworth is also, stunningly, in quite a good mood. He’s made tacos. The kitchen is strewn with Pizzazz packaging and a photo set of some smug guy holding various chilli peppers off the recipe. Plus he’s even being attentive. Yammers for ten minutes about the trim of Richie’s hair looking ‘all yeehaw’. Then he tips him over the sink to cut it straight. “I’ve been waiting a bit to tell you something funny that happened at work today. Soon as I got in the car. I just went, ‘now Richard would get a big old kick out of this’,” Went says, lining a pair of scissors up with Richie’s ear.

Funny stories from the Chapel Meadow surgery are usually either to scare him (see the little girl who swallowed all her own teeth, Lik-M-Aid consumption) or to convince him to someday work there (see the sharp young apprentice who had four different girlfriends, one for every member of the Bangles, Oral Health Science at UMaine.) “Fuckin’ sweet. Someone swallow a sickle probe again?” Richie asks into the plughole. 

“Almost. I had Georgie Denbrough in with me today for a ‘funny taste in his mouth’. That boy’s mouth is like a cemetery as is, let me tell you. Barely into his double digits and already stuffed with those rickety mercury fillings, braces, the works. I was digging around his mouth with a scaler until I accidentally popped out his wobbly tooth. Then the scaler went and got stuck in the gap.” 

“Uh oh.”

“Was completely wedged in there. Twenty minutes of wriggling it around. I called up the hotline for the place we get all our equipment from and the fellow kept saying, ‘just twist anti-clockwise, turn it anti-clockwise’. Not sure how that was meant to help but I followed him until, what do you know, Georgie loses a _second_ tooth. Mr. Hotline more or less had me pulverize it. Now I’ve got him booked in twice more this week.”

Loose hair falls down Richie’s nose. He hasn’t had it cut at home since Mom gave him a Moe Howard, the resultantly horrifying summer of ‘88. “Jeez Dad. You’re either onto a really sustainable business plan or they’re gonna make you into a Derry ghost story. Bambo Boulevard crossbow murderer, legless werewolf with a spoon fetish and dentist who hacks your jaw up for steadier income. Coming soon to all fires of Kenduskeag nightmare camp.” 

Dad brushes the hair off. “You used to like Kenduskeag camp. They let you ride the ponies. Also I think you might have dreamed the one with the werewolf.” 

“Nah, it’s just ongoing.” 

Went flicks a few more black locks away with the cold tap. Patty said a while back she could tell Richie’s gonna lose all his hair fast. Both his grandpas are a solid V on the Hamilton-Norwood scale, and his tache came in weirdly young, which is meant to be a bad sign. (The only place hair has grown for most of his adolescence. He shaves this little rat before the house wakes up every morning while still sporting the legs of Brooke Shields.) Nevertheless, she was wrong. His problem apparently lies more with going _grey_. A coil of wet, silver hair lands on the ceramic. “What, is that my hair?!” Richie curdles, whipping his head up so hard he nicks his cheek on Dad’s scissors.

Wentworth freezes, bemused. He’s wearing Mom’s old _cook as good as I look!_ apron. “It was,” he says slowly. “I know, it looks like more than it is. Yours grows so damn thick.” 

“It was all white!” Richie flicks a taut hand at the sink.

“Why else do you think I’d cut it?”

“‘Cause it’s, like, not even anymore. You didn’t say anything about it being fucking white.” 

“Richie, I barely know what even looks like. When I was a kid grandpa Donnie would just buzz me a crew cut and be done with it. I said I’d trim it because it looks _silly_ , which it did, thanks to whatever you and your little Blank Generation buddies thought was so cool. What did you even do that with? Tide? Did the Uris’ let you take Tide?” He shakes his head (maybe an III) and moves to plate up tacos. The version of him that cooks/dishes out haircuts still likes to berate Richie for things that should keep him up at night in a pool of paternal sweat, ostensibly. 

“We going on vacation or something?” Richie picks up one of the _Coaldown Escapes; they’ll do ya good_ pamphlets over on the dining table. It’s tossed with some papers that have Maggie’s name on. 

Dad looks crisply over his shoulder. “I don’t know. Would you like to go on vacation in Coaldown?” 

“I mean, was kind of juiced for Florida. When we watched Caddyshack again last week I started really missing it, even if that movie is horrible and people only ever really watch it ‘cause of Chevy Chase and Bill Murray in those stupid golf outfits, it’s still hot green Florida. I guess sad coal town off the highway is also good though.”

“It’s much more than a sad coal town. They’ve got a man-made beach,” Wentworth lulls as he hands over dinner then bustles out of the door. Aw, yeah. Remembered to get the spicy cheese this time. 

“How’s a man make a beach?” Richie calls down the hallway, digging in. 

“Lots of bags of sand and hard work. Construction may be a dead end profession but the men’s minds behind it are really quite genius.”

“I heard there’s a good therapist in Coaldown.” 

“There you go, then. If you have one of your tantrums while we’re out there we’ll pay for you to get hypnotized, top notch.” Dad springs back into the room with his hair sort of rakish and, sure as shit, the biggest of his _Olympia Sports_ boxes. This time it’s open. Something glossy and bright orange is poking over the flap. “I went shopping around at the weekend, by the way. Picked up some boys’ toys. Wondering if you’d have a play with me after dinner?”

“You can’t stuff me with tacos then make me play sports, Pop, I’ll literally pass out,” Richie says tartly, sucking chilli off his thumb. After seeing Dad’s stash of these the other night he’s been getting ready for this. He thought up a clumsy parallel between wrestling and really intense D&D beast roleplay laying in bed yesterday, just in the name of coping. “The monkey only dances one dance at a time. And also won’t dance if you get mad at it for not turning into Burt Hennig straightaway.” 

“I said after dinner. You’ll just have to be mindful while you’re eating, not inhale it,” Dad says with a bright shrug. “I’m not sure I’m familiar with Burt.” 

“Is there one of those bathing suit thingies in that box? ‘Cause if there is I’m legit gonna have to lube up. I’m gonna have to coat myself in taco beef oil.” 

“You don’t have to wear that yet. Probably need a bit of time to slim down first.”

“Oh okay. Until then I’ll file that under suicide note citations. Maybe also pros for dabbling in speed if one of my future college lackeys ever offers.”

“It was good enough for Matthew Modine!”

Dad makes him stand in the living room in a helmet after tacos. He puts the American Music Show on. Bobby is sat at a fold-out TV table still working on his dinner. “I was watching that,” he mumbles as A Boy and His Frog is flipped off. Dad doesn’t notice though. He’s too busy chanting like a Wizard of Oz soldier; 

“Stance, penetration, level change. Stance, penetration, level change.” 

Richie’s headache eyes blip the Pasadenas video on TV into more of a Soundgarden one. Worse, he has chronic urge to giggle. “Is that Gregorian, Dad?” He says in a high voice. 

“Staples of wrestling,” Went says as he messes with Richie’s shoulders. He’s trying to mold him into something like a slouch but without the awkwardness nor the carpal tunnel. “It might look like a lot of rough and tumble but it’s actually incredibly logical. You keep those in mind at all times and you’ll be able to fight...Heavens, Gary from church.”

“I would never fight Gary from church. He’s way too funny when he starts crying midway through the hymns.”

“I’m not saying you would. I mean theoretically you _could_ , even while he’s got those great big muscles, six feet tall, like Carl Weathers or someone. Now stay standing like that and stick your butt out - right out like you’re posing.”

“Did you say this comes before penetration?”

“Yes. Please don’t be a child.” 

Richie, beaten, sticks his butt out. He also tries to blink morse for HELP ME at Bobby, who is hiding a shy snort in his cup of milk. “You know, Stanley’s brother was telling me that all this stuff is meant to be play acting. Most of the guys in big bucks type wrestling just have to make up a character and the rest is all special effects. It doesn’t have to be genuinely, like, athletic. It’s just got to be bad-ass,” he blanks. 

“Those TV shows are _not_ representative of real sport, kid. They’re just a -“ he pauses with a hand on Richie’s back to groan over the Pasadenas cutting out. They didn’t even let the song get to the end before running a Carl’s Jr ad. (AKA Dad’s least favorite media on earth. He’d have probably tried to protest to Carl himself if the chain even reached Derry. _Weight Gain and Jizz Stains - Get off the damn air!_ his imaginary picket reads.) “- A bunch of arrogant loafers, prancing around all hot over Cyndi Lauper. Push your knee on the ground.”

“Not everyone who’s a loafer is arrogant though. Most of them are just good old fashioned fellers trying to get by. Like Eddie’s dad,” Richie says, donkey kicking the carpet. Yee-ouch. Burlap. 

“Don’t stamp, glide. Eddie’s dad isn’t a loafer. What happened to him was plain sad.” 

“I thought you said all people who don’t work are loafers.” 

Wentworth is grousing about the commercial again. It’s the one with the office guys spying on that hot chick nextdoor. The second it cuts to her sparkly white dress and big, saucy burger he absent-mindedly karate chops. “Sorry. Frank _did_ work. He was doing just fine. Then funding cuts came along and apparently the people cleaning up after you piggy kids weren’t worth holding onto. Try your other knee.”

Both knees are going that woozy dried gum color which means they’re about to bleed. Ever since this problem spiked up bad again Richie’s studied it. If it starts feeling like someone is boiling soup under his skin and or he starts itching it he knows to immediately run off somewhere private before the spirit of Sandra McKenzie comes to visit. (One of her ads had come on while he was scrubbing the blood out of his cotton shorts last week, with ARE YOU ON THE RAG? in coral pink letters. He couldn’t stop thinking about that dumb movie Switch afterwards.) His right leg hits the floor all daintily. Like in kickball. If you’re dainty in kickball you don’t have to run. “I never realized you were so into the rights of janitors.” 

“Usually I think you’ve got to have a college degree to be able to moan about anything in this life, but Frank’s a nice man. That family has suffered too much. What, with that wife being like she is, Eddie having gone so wayward. I just don’t like seeing a guy put through hell.” Wentworth tilts his head like Richie’s a painting he did. Struggling Dork on canvas; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Herb. “Jeez, Rich. Try and use your muscles.”

Richie flops onto his belly, now, which he’s also done before in kickball. “Eddie’s the least wayward guy in the county. The other day I saw him wearing these socks with little boats on them. I assumed there must have been nothing else clean so he’d had to delve in the sixth grade back to school trove but then today he was wearing little anchors. He owns and liberally utilises a set of nautical ankle socks. Nautical.”

“I don’t know. I’ve had a bad feeling about him for a bit.”

He stares at his fingernails in the carpet. They look all wobbly. His headache’s probably spun into a migraine at this point. “‘Cause he’s queer?” He says faux-casually.

“Don’t be silly. I just mean he isn’t such a timid little thing as he was. I see him all around town, now, paste in his hair like we’re in England.” 

“I’m sure the strapping lads on the Derry Beavers aren’t timid either.” 

“Well, you know what I’m getting at. He’s less timid and more sad, alienated almost. Alienated people often end up causing a lot of trouble. Just look at that Jeffrey Dahmer. He got so alienated he started eating people.” 

“Yeah but Eddie’s only alienated cuz he’s queer.”

There’s this weird, buffeting silence. You can still hear Bobby licking the sour cream off his knuckles and the new Grey Poupon squeeze bottle commercial playing, but. Dad’s face somehow makes it feel silent. Namely Dad’s _turkey face_. His good mood is currently dying in an alleyway somewhere. “Are we done with the penetration step now? I’m, um, all penetrated out. Did a gigantic penetrative number on me,” Richie attempts to cut through, rolling onto his back like an anxious dog. His glasses fall off onto the fireplace mantle. “I wanna move onto tackling Bobby to death or something.”

Dad rubs his work pants real slow. He lowers himself into the free part of couch next to Bobby, sighing blandly. “No, you don’t have to worry about that, Rich. You can go scribble in your bedroom,” he says in his root canal walkthrough voice. 

“Dad, I was just starting to get into it!” Richie lies. His migraine is chugging along so hard now he hears himself a few seconds after his lips stop moving. Dad just keeps on rubbing at his skinny legs.

“Funny way of showing it. Thought it might be nice for us to have this together, after everything that’s gone on. But I don’t mind if you disagree.” 

“You’re not _seriously_ making the penetration step about Mom.” 

Went’s voice shifts to how he’d do it explaining the pulp extraction part of the procedure. _Now, you’ll only be knocked out cold for six hours, no sweat. I’ll only mutilate you a little bit. If your jaw doesn’t fall clean off I’ll give you a Saf’T’Pop._ “I’m not making anything about anything. You’re the one who likes talking about dying and killing yourself like it’s a joke all the time, after all. A joke or a punishment. And I just don’t want to spend the night forcing you along,” he says. Then he gives himself a final little de-crease, ruffles Bobby’s hair, and walks back to the kitchen.

Up in his room, Richie draws a giant werewolf in his notebook that takes up two pages with Sandy Rosner’s lipstick. Then he tears that out and tries to draw Fudge-Dog riding a surfboard, only it comes out as another werewolf. At which point he ditches his computer desk altogether. Takes his shirt off and, as he apparently always does while feeling weird and alone, ogles his eczema in front of the mirror. His stomach looks half-eaten. It’s all dark pink with hippie psychedelia pattern scars. Richie clicks a Daniel Johnston tape into his boombox and decides he’ll blame his dad for this. 

That’s the bucko in the mirror after all. He’s always had his dad’s stupid face. Probably where all the ‘I’m trying to torture you’ veiled in ‘I’m trying to connect with you’ was born, in the crook of that stupid nose. Although Christine once said that Dad was weird with him because when they were babies everyone thought Richie was a girl. The doctors had screwed up the scan or something. Both fluorescent microblobs on the screen had looked way too similar to be non-identical (“technology sucked ass back then, Rich. Fat, sweaty grandpa ass. They didn’t even have electricity.”) so were deemed two girls. Then Mom and Dad had gone out and bought a gazillion matching dresses and ribbons and Lisa Frank lunch-boxes, they’d practically sent the whole of Limited Too bust. They paraded Richie around in all that until a nasty shock while changing him the next week. Earth-shakingly, though, that was all a lie. (Christy’s attempt to have him give her a go on Captain Power after he got the VHS for Christmas. She’d been tempting him via trading her bendy dolls, ‘just like old days.’ The intricacy would be impressive had Captain Power not been a royal waste of money and had the story not given way to some great, terrible crisis that would never ever end.) 

(What’s that crisis again? That Dad doesn’t think you’re a real guy or that he does? Why are both of those so mortifying? Why every way you look at this body is it ugly and horrible and false? Here - it’s okay, take it at your own pace, have some Bubble Yum.)

Richie blinks the ghost of Missus Kelsch out of his head before she starts talking him through butterfly breathing. He looks down at the lipstick. Sandy Rosner’s never gonna have to know _her_ dad hates her ‘cause she’s not a real guy (like, 99% chance.) Her dad’s never gonna make her wrestle or go to the neighborhood boys’ night ‘slumber party’ (despite knowing nobody there and the ‘party games’ being moderately traumatizing) or hold the sparklers for July 4th (despite going through a period of pyrophobia after having seen Always with her grandma - totally not a problem anymore.) Even Christine won’t suffer that. Not that they’ve got it easier for being girls. Obviously. They’ve just got it easier for being _real_ ones. 

_My Life Is Starting Over_ starts playing. Richie looks over his stupid nose, stupid neck and stupid chest one more time. Then he knows what to do; put Sandy’s lipstick on his face. He did it all the time when he was little. Most days for Lulu Cat and some days for some kind of self harm. He chalks it over his lips with bugged out elbows. _Ya happy now, Richie? Ya get it now?!_ is what his wriggling brows in the mirror seem to say. The red slops all over his cheeks like those rashes they show on Spread The Word PSAs. Like a sick person. Can’t even get away looking like those new romantic boys Patty likes so much ‘cause his reflection isn’t even a boy. 

Oh, no. Richie scrambles for a kleenex. He’s wiping it for Goddamn America. Oh, _no_. There’s still no boy under there. His whole top lip is sparkling clean and he’s not even a little bit of a boy, not even a fake one, not even a screw-up or a big frilly queer. He gawps at the stained tissue, then his bleeding stomach, then the tissue again, stomach, tissue, stomach, window. His bedroom window flies open. Please God. Have mercy. Don’t curse him with all this and then some rabid fucking woodland -

Eddie Kaspbrak. “Richie Tozier, Richie Tozier, let down your - AGH - _balls_!” 

The sunset seems to have blasted in from behind Eddie’s butt. He slides over the windowsill in a weft of green-yellow light and knocked-over OK soda cans, gaudy baseball cap falling on the carpet. Thinks he’s a Saved By The Bell girl or some kind of kamikaze. Richie’s autopilot system is wired to fire off at this stuff. He keeps pressing the ON button in his head but the battery’s dead. Automated low power message: “I’m so fucking sick of you following me around.”

Eddie doesn’t look offended. Gloriously, he doesn’t even look worried. He drops in a heap and just kind of holds his breath. “You want me to wait outside?” He asks. 

“For what?” 

“Just say if you want me to wait outside for a second.”

“Do whatever you want.” 

He waits on the porch roof while Richie stares at the wall for five minutes. ( _That’s what you learn to do when you grow up, put things in boxes. When you feel like crying or being sick, you put it in a box, and you shove it in your closet_ ). The exploding boy/thing puts his sweater back on and tapes his proverbial box shut eight times over. Then he flips himself over the windowsill backwards. 

“Oh, fuck - what are you doing?” Eddie cribs. He _does_ look worried now. Although it’s probably more about being out here than anything else. Been scared of falling off something high ever since Quincy M.E. had an episode where a dead guy’s skull caved in from bridge jumping. (Yeah. Eddie actually watches those reruns. Sooooo wayward.) Then again when they’d all watched Greg Louganis dive for the USA a few years later. Louganis had won gold, of course, in spite of all head thwonk adversities, but Eddie could still ‘hear that fucking death-thump every time I climb staircases’. 

Richie looks at him upside down as if for the first time. Wise choice, really. “I’m waiting for all the blood to rush to my head and partially kill me or clot my brain so that when I stand up my migraine won’t feel like such a rough deal and I won’t be able to tell God hates me anymore,” he says in one breath. “What are you doing loitering outside my window is a tons better question though. You do this for fun, junior? You one of those Peeping Todds the missus keeps pissing her bloomers about?” 

Eddie picks at his jacket pocket irritably/shyly. “We could smoke again or something.”

“Oh, from where I come from we take tylenol.” 

“How’s that working out for you?”

“Brilliantly. Medicine really, like, helps to treat maladies and such, it’s whacky.” 

“Don’t try to out-med me right now. My mom’s girlfriend smoked weed all summer when she slipped a disc in her back and barely felt a thing. She’s a member of the freaking Parents’ Music Resource Coalition.”

Richie almost lands his own trip to old Quince’s office falling out of the window. His shoulders do this crazy pigeon move. Eddie goes white and tries to hold him up but halts when he sees he’s alright. “Is girlfriend code for - um - 24-hour carer?!” 

Eddie’s face crunches up. Master of eyebrow animation. Browbender even. “God. You’re so brutally behind it’s like talking to somebody from the war all the time. Why do you think her and my dad split?”

“‘Cause she’s a fucking harpy, obviously.”

“Nah, she’s a _love rat_. She met Fiona at this Bobby Goldsboro dance night in Portland a couple years ago. New Years, I think. I was just sitting there watching Dick Clark with my dad thinking I was gonna have to skip town or die before I ever got to come out all while she was ‘exploring’ with some old white lady to Little Green Apples. Apparently that happens a lot in forty or so year olds. Midlife crises can be very illuminating.” 

Absorbing this information is like developing eczema of the brain. Last Richie knew of Mrs. Kaspbrak she made house guests wear rubber gloves to the bathroom and told him off for ‘cutting capers’ in her backyard ‘cause he could wear down the grass and soil and hit a wire and gas everyone. “So trippy. They should run a...a concordance study on you guys or something. Like they do when two twins both kill themselves,” he hotfoots, forehead now a warm numb. 

“Trust me, it’s not genetic. Fiona has a kid too. Jared. My half-brother if things were normal. I thought he might be queer ‘cause he rides a motorcycle but then when I met him he called me ‘brand new’ to his mom,” Eddie sniggers. 

“Well screw that in the ass. Is he so kitted out in Gold’s Gym all the nerves in his legs are going?” 

“Right on, man. Every time he breathes heavy it just sounds like the piano chords from Breakfast In America. Next time he stays the night I’ll smother him.”

They both laugh sort of sadly. Maybe it’s the birds singing or Dad’s ice machine funeral drumming downstairs. Eddie fumbles with his Devil jeans and looks like one of those wall ads at a train station. He could be the boy on the Baby Love’s Soft spread with the ski-lift and the dusky arm around...around some gorgeous… “Do you wanna go meet my friends? If you’re in the mood where you’re nice and tolerant to people. Which. Yeah,” he goes on. 

Richie pops his head back the right way up. He waits seven seconds for his skull to stop incinerating. “Nice, tolerant, and kind of a stud too. We’re not investigating anything tonight?”

“No, we are. You’ll see.” 

Eddie’s friends are a college couple eating G.D. Ritzy’s takeout in a rented car with the sunroof torn off. He met them through something coyly waved off as ‘a special hotline’. There’s the shorter one on the wheel side, Charles (“holy shit, it’s Charles & Eddie. This is my very first backstage VIP experience. Which one of you’s gonna sign my buttcrack?”), who has a fortune cookie tattooed on his shoulder and hair long enough to reach it. The taller can barely stay awake through his cheesy double Ritz. He’s called Kurt. “ _Richie Tozier_? Your name is Richie Tozier, sincerely?” he says drowsily through the gap between seat and headrest. 

Richie, feeling morbidly out of place in the back, says, “sincerely dude.”

Kurt rubs the heel of his hand over his eyes like he’s not sure if he’s dreaming. A little pink Nicoderm pops out from under his sleeve. Funny, Richie’s never seen one of those in real life yet; even funnier there’s the dark map of a cigarette box in Kurt’s breast pocket. “This is so fucking crazy. Soon as we pulled into town, I totally called it, I said this weekend was gonna be crazy,” the guy marvels as the car hits a bump. Eddie says something like ‘probably a possum’ over the radio. “There’s a Richie Tozier that lives on my block.”

“Wow. Well we’re a pretty up and coming cult.” 

“Are you being serious?” 

“Oh, no. I’m actually kind of kirked. The proper old English surname is meant to be Tozer but I think my great-great-grandpa had some kind of speech impediment. So, like, rare as balls. Which actually aren’t in any way rare now that I…” Richie’s seatbelt gives him a nutcracker choke. They’ve jolted again. Eddie is fidgeting with the back of Charles’ hair while orienteering him, which is weird, with regards to the large babbling boyfriend under a foot away. “Is the guy on your block cool?” 

Kurt does a throaty noise meant to mean ‘blegh’. “When she’s actually around. She’s a she by the way. Last I heard Richie was headed out west to pull her weight in the LA riots, so a few months ago now. All we got since then was her mail, milk bottles and this one phone call asking if her cat was still alive.” 

“Which it wasn’t by the way. Super traumatizing,” offers Charles. He’s fucking with the radio dials like he’ll get anything other than Wendy & Willie’s Evening Wind-Down. “Does your local station seriously not play any music?” 

Eddie finally figures how to keep his hands to himself. He’ll probably be asleep soon. “Not right now. It’s technically past curfew so they don’t want to play anything that’s gonna hype any wastrels like us up,” he says as Willie introduces the next topic of discussion - whether Seinfeld should be taken off air. (Wendy keeps referring to that masturbation episode last week as ‘the handy shandy one’.) “Geographically speaking we should be able to get WABI or even the UMaine one but it’s like the frequencies are rigged, I don’t know why.” 

“You really weren’t kidding about the ghost town stuff.” 

“Wait until we find the actual ghost.” 

Richie looks up from his unofficial staring contest with Kurt, who looks like he might have died. “What’s actually the deal with all that tonight?” 

Eddie’s definitely falling asleep. The clap he gives Richie on the shoulder lands on his neck and is more like he’s tickling a baby. “We’re going to the little house you found. To...to slay the beast,” he says all husky. 

“Um. I feel like we aren’t really onto the knocking on people’s doors and accusing them of lycanthropy or abducting tween boys circuit.” 

“No knocking necessary....none at…” 

They pull up at a campsite parking lot and wait out in the drizzle for Eddie to wake up. Charles and Kurt make out a little bit. They do it while _smoking_ , which is kind of awful, but kind of neat cause their mouths go cloudy like in a comic. Then they all hike up past the burned down sleepaway cabins into the trees. Admittedly, this is the spookiest stretch of the woods. You’ve got your east end with the fallen trees which is reasonably spooky. Mostly for dog walkers and field trips (Richie had one in grade 6 where he just had to count sweetgale shrubs for several hours.) Then your west is like a huge skeleton from the ‘87 forest fire. That’s here. It’s a pretty steady trek apart from all the goths that like to hang out in the ditched rubble.

For instance the three of them huddled round a book or scroll or something in the fishing goods store wreckage pile. A girl in Pixie Death winkle-pickers calls, “what the Hell? You guys can’t be in here at this time.” 

Eddie has now moved onto hanging off Kurt, a phenomenon that is becoming increasingly surreal. He’s been walking around with his fists clenched like he’s some kind of serial killer for sixteen years then wears one crop shirt and suddenly is an incorrigible minx. “Is something meant to be going on?” He calls back. 

“...Curfew?” 

“Yeah but you guys are outside too.” 

“My yard backs onto this. And if you’re doing something important that means you absolutely _have_ to be outside they can’t get you for it, the guidance counsellor said it. That’s our case. We’re gonna catch the Ghoul of the Gulch.” 

Eddie snorts. “Everyone’s yard backs onto this. Aren’t you all like fourteen?” 

Two other girls similarly kitted in studs and bell sleeves appear from either side of her, looking at him like he’s a wild animal. They very much do look fourteen, so Richie’s waggish little daydream of the bleach-haired one pulling out a pistol grip firearm and squealing, _this is our fort, get gone, normies!_ is minorly adjusted to one where she has a foam ball launcher. “That’s no weakness around here. At least we don’t think search parties or calling the police is going to conquer evil,” Pixie Death says through gritted teeth. “We’re making a ouija board. You wouldn’t know what it is.” 

Charles looks up from the Great Furniture Dump Ditch just behind them (Stanley’s Fat Wheels got tossed in there somewhere after he’d accidentally fired it into the face of his grandparents’ Mondaine clock. Fly high, Strawsy) and offers, “my sister did one of those. She kept talking to this little girl named Mandy on it but then she microfiched a load of shit about her house and it turned out the Mandy that used to live there was still alive. She moved away after having a huge accident where her horse nearly trampled her. Then my sister was showering this one time and could hear really loud clip-clopping in the hallway. Like hooves. So turns out she was talking to a psycho thoroughbred the whole time.” 

None of the goth girls really have a response to this. The bleach-haired witters something like ‘no horses in the fucking woods’ then Pixie Death conclusively lobs her soda at them all. 

The house is brilliantly, completely uninhabited when they get up there. Everyone’s sticky with Pop A Rouge and rain. Kurt leans against a shuttered window and produces a crowbar from his backpack. Something no guy with eyes permanently three quarters shut should be wielding under your nose. “Oh. A gemmy,” Richie says, vaunting the new vocab.

“You can’t act like it’s a horrible idea or it’s gonna get us into trouble because that’s exactly what I said about Mr Christie’s house and you’re still making me feel like shit about it five years later even though it was _my_ revenge,” says Eddie.

“I literally just said that it’s a gemmy. And although I think you have a lot of dumb little thoughts that deserve to be shit on, we _aren’t_ getting in trouble. When Walty Nell talks in assembly about Derry having the most solid security in the county it’s like that bit in Cheers where he’s like, ‘oh, we have so many good psychiatrists here’ and you can see a suicide jumper in the back.”

“You’re probably the only person on the planet to watch Cheers and be first name basis with a police officer.”

“Crimes and heartwarming times. My creed.” 

Kurt and Charles have this way about them that shows nobody’s really ever picked them up on anything, or at least not for a long time. They’d totally be able to cut class in the bike sheds or the old boys’ bathroom or someplace without Mr. Pinson charging in and screaming blue murder about ‘brain cramp’ and black spores. They had that kind of luck. “This stuff’s so much easier than our usual gigs,” Charles says, rubbing Kurt’s back while he works on the door. “Tons easier than an establishment type of place, even though those usually feel more righteous. Three weeks ago we took down a closed movie theatre and it was a huge deal.” 

“Wow. An abandoned movie theatre would be scary as fuck. Black TV screens always make me feel short of breath or something,” Richie offers, not sure where to look. Kibitzing city dudes dressed like Mary Stuart Masterson, Eddie Kaspbrak trying to look debonair faced with the moldiest looking building in Maine, or the black of night. What a carte du jour. Then the door pops open. Charles leaps on Kurt’s back and pumps an ‘onward!’ fist as the smell of baked wallpaper hits them. 

“No, that’s the whole thing. It wasn’t abandoned. It was just two in the morning,” he pipes.

“Oh. Cool. Were either of you guys ever like, ‘why’?”

“Those leather cinema seats, obviously. You spend a year in a dorm with no natural sunlight coming in and all you’ll think about is leather cinema seats.” 

The cottage, cabin, whatever-the-fuck is even smaller than it looks. Mostly it’s just one room with tired paisley carpet and a little picture of the old station back when it was up and running. Then there’s two doors, one of which leads to a bathroom that could easily house a Shivers remake, one of which is blocked. “It definitely leads somewhere indoors. Can’t feel any air or smell any water,” Eddie says, holding his scruffy head close to it. 

Richie pushes his glasses off, snow globe in hand. (“When you have your glasses on and I look at you in the dark it’s like the frames disappear and you look kind of like Fats from Magic,” says some co-opted voice from childhood in his head.) “Sweet. Either that or you aren’t a massive cavefish.” 

Eddie’s cheeks twitch. “Cavefish are the ones with the hearing, Poindexter. Water in natural settings legitimately reeks.”

“I think you just have a superpower,” says Kurt mid bathroom inquest. 

“I mean, maybe. Kids did used to call me Trickle in middle school.” 

“Wasn’t that more of a peeing-your-pants-affiliated thing?” Richie asks, almost genuine, and is condignly whacked in the stomach. 

They spend about fifteen minutes gingerly poking wallpaper peels and jumping when Kurt’s crowbar bumps something before anything interesting happens. And the interesting thing isn’t even inside the house. It’s a guy wearing a sweatband walking up and down the slope outside. Everybody crams up by the window like a family Christmas photo. Richie says, “I think he’s one of those sporty granddads. Like Jack Nicklaus. My dad loves Jack Nicklaus,” from somewhere in Eddie’s armpit. 

The guy outside starts stretching as he walks, like he’s heard him. There’s a tiny camping torch between his teeth. “I think Jack Nicklaus was only in his forties when he got golf-famous, but I take your point,” the armpit says back. “Old people who insist on staying active and doing shit everyday upset me. Like, capitalism finally kind of let you off the hook. Why are you still operational? For something totally psychopathic-ally evil?” 

“Do you think he works out in the dark because he’s self-conscious?” says Kurt dimly. He’s the tallest of all of them so he lucked out with back row. Charles makes this weird giggling noise that Richie turns to look at. They remind him of the princess and the frog if instead of a boy in the body of a frog it was the other way around.

“My mom told me after you turn twenty you don’t get self-conscious anymore.” 

“Oh. Same goes for if you turn into a werewolf, probably.”

“For sure.”

When Richie turns back to psycho Jack Nicklaus, the rough, moonlit pasta shape of him is gone. Oh, wait, not gone, moved. Moved closer. He doesn’t ask if the man is walking towards the cottage because A) he would never do anything to imply his eye doctors are, ya know, reasonable people and B) Eddie has started breathing weird. He’s shaking at the (jammed, again) window and then again with the other across the room. Charles squeaks, “tell him we’re here for an - an art project!” roughly before the front door handle is going. Oh Jesus. While Derry’s buttcrack security makes for easy break ins and stolen tacos from the Outlet, it also makes for a lot of matters-in-own-hands situations. If this guy happens to pack a McClain’s Law Smith & Wesson .44 on his jogs and blows them all dead with it in four seconds it’ll probably just be another Aw Shucks on page 2 of the newsletter.

Richie, feeling like he really might be on McClain’s Law, gestures wildly at the bathroom door. Kind of makes him puff his chest the way Kurt and Charles instantly scramble that direction. Eddie doesn’t though. He’s still standing at the window with an oddly forlorn look on his face. “Trickle, bathroom,” Richie hisses at him. “Lets _please_ go to the bathroom.” 

Nothing. 

“Come on, Eds. If he tries to walk in on us in there and he’s mad then we’ll crack his skull with a plunger or something. _Swallow this! Wazaaaggghh!_!” 

Again, nothing. He looks like a shitty corpse model from Bad Taste or Toxic Avenger or something similarly dime-store. Richie reaches out to yank him away by the arm, which tips him flat on his face. Eddie’s head hits the ground with his eyes wide. And then the front door opens. 

The man’s face is pink and bumpy. He hovers in the doorframe, mud all over his sweats and British Knights. “Oh, cripes. _There_ you are. We’ve been looking for you all night, man!” Richie squeaks while vowing never to be patient with anyone ever again. When motor-mouthing under pressure he gets a slight transatlantic accent. “We’ve got a form for you to sign kicking around somewhere. When this project we’ve been conducting on interiors around town is finished we’ll put your name on the plaque, you know, ‘cause it’s a photography project. Dazzling design credit to - insert your name - up in the Contemporary Centre.” 

This guy is no Merle. Maybe Eddie having an Atonic seizure in the corner is ruining the effect. “What are you doing?” Is all he says, curling his fingers. 

“Leaving, gladly. The form’s only an added extra. Art without context provokes a little more thought anyways.”

“Who let you in?”

“Uh. This guy with no legs and hair all over his face.”

His blank look is rivalling Eddie’s. You can see he’s not that old once the dark thins out. Enough to be grey ( _Like me!_ Embarrassing Inner Scribe glibs) and patchy up top with mottled looking hands, but young enough for a job, maybe. If Richie could somehow catch him on shaker camera right now his dad’d probably able to tell him his name, where he works and how well he’s hanging onto it. If he works at Eggsley Elder Law Offices or Copy House Went could add bosses’ personal opinions & bugbears. “You think a ghost story’s worth a jail sentence,” the man says, reedy.

Richie grin-winces. Grinces, if you will. “Well when you put it like that.”

“Please go home.”

“Good shout, mister.”

Having given Nicklaus the full later days and better lays Richie once again finds himself carrying Eddie’s 300 degree body through the woods. This time Eddie is conscious in the middle of it, though. Which makes it Richie’s least favorite time. It reminds him of being 14 and his mom having one of her lucid moments when he was filling her capsule. She’d always give him an odd needy look and he’d freak out and run off and make Christine do it next time. Eddie is not much of a needy character though. He pings up in Richie’s arms like a Knock Your Block Off to immediately say, “Richie, go around the back.” 

As if stumbling around in the woods with two squealing bozos and a potential police report 10 feet behind him isn’t disorienting enough. “You’re not even dead!” Richie huffs. 

“My legs are fucking killing me. Go around the back of the cabin and hitch me up to look in the window.”

“Why?!”

“I’ll see the room with the jammed door.” 

Richie goes to put him back on the ground but Eddie does a pony scream. “My _legs_! I just came back to life, dude, walk me to that godforsaken window or that deal with the devil wasn’t for shit. Walk me over there for Angel Heart.”

Looking through the window is not as easy as it seems. Richie’s nowhere near the tallest in his grade but the few inches he’s kind of always had on Eddie made him designated piggyback-giving-horsie-trotting step ladder before the break. Apparently it hasn’t carried through to 16. Or this window’s just super high. He passes Eddie to Kurt like he’s a Patti Play Pal lunchbox to climb on a trashcan. Charles holds it steady. Then Eddie is put back in Richie’s arms (oh, God). Then Richie holds up his waist and takes a cricked neck over resting his cheek on his butt, looking out over the trees while the smaller boy wriggles. It’s the darkest night he’s probably ever seen. Not dark like colors or lights but, like, the air. You can breathe that kind of dark in. Richie closes his eyes and sucks up a load of it as a little _oh_ squirls from above his shoulders. 

Eddie full-body buckles suddenly. The trash can groans as he sends a jet of pressure through it. He doesn’t say anything, but he’s also turning into a fold up picnic table, so Richie guesses he doesn’t have to. Charles keeps going, “Eddie, what is it? What did you see Eddie? Eddie did you see something?” like he’s training a dog not to shit on the carpet. 

Once Eddie slides to the ground all chalky and quiet Richie stands up on his tiptoes. The window’s not clean enough to see clear. One of those retro fridges that come in dark blue or pink in there, an off lamp. A perversely unsuited Mork & Mindy poster on the wall (nanoo fuckin’ nanoo.) And then there’s what Richie will come to know as the next great apocalypse. The world can actually end a bunch of times, despite what, like, the entire nature of ending might make you think. It can end when Eddie hits puberty and he can say ‘I can’t just hang with you for the rest of my life, you know’ in Highlander Adrian Paul voice, it can end when Mom dies without you, it can end when your dick’s not even enough to make you a man anymore. And it can end with Simon Weisshart’s dead, legless body bled out on the countertop. Richie watches a moth crawl the zipper of Simon’s Jordache jeans; his nostrils are full of vomit. 

-

“Nobody knows what’s happened to him.”

“Right.”

“Nobody in this whole town knows. Nobody on this _planet_ knows. His own fucking family is sitting at home watching Doogie Howser without the barest weirdest little spidey sense of what’s happened to him.” 

“We just have to get through the night so we can hit the station and then the cops will make everything...um, they’ll deal with it.”

“We can’t go to the cops, Richie.”

“I know. I get it. They’re a bunch of big blue spud sacks and they’ve never fixed anything and won’t as long as we’re alive but, like. They might roughly know where to start with this. Which is thirty dick miles further than me right now.” 

“No, I mean we actually can’t. We’re tipping on the anonymous hotline.” A shift. “Kurt’s already got an indecent exposure and a public intoxication charge from his eighteenth birthday. His cousin got him Blue Nun on the lowdown. And, like, magic mushrooms. And berry flavor Bartles & Jaymes. And -”

“Oh my God. Well thank you for inviting Courtney Love to file a police report with us.”

“This was never meant to be about filing a police report. We were meant to get out there and...and slay the...you know, Monster Squad, Werewolf Nuts, or pick a lock on Simon’s...cage…”

“Then just! Stop thinking about it.” 

“You’re a poet, man.” 

“Leave thy mind, behind. ‘Ere it dost start to smart.” 

“Much appreciated Iago.” 

“Still can’t believe you just dropped like that.” 

“Yeah, paraplexy. Sucks way worse than sleep attacks.” 

“They won’t be by the way.”

“Huh?”

“Simon and Adam’s parents. They won’t be watching Doogie. Tanya McNeely talks a lot of guff but she was saying in homeroom the other day Mr. Weisshart zorked his fist through their TV screen when he found out Simon was gone and I can kind of, um, see it.” 

“Feel puke coming up again. Move over.” 

Eddie’s bedroom either feels miles away from the rest of Derry or Richie’s head isn’t back to normal yet. It’s in the attic, so it’s bigger than the house looks like it’s got room for. There’s red-and-green lights where the wall slopes down. The powerbox is right on the edge of Eddie’s dresser, which is covered in tacked up 7th inning CHL memorial cards (hockey players, basically). Plus a TV set the size of a microwave on top. It’s playing a Head Of The Class episode which you can tell is a few years old ‘cause it’s the one where the gang heads off to the USSR. Then there’s a bunch of dip bars around the windows, but those aren’t Eddie’s. “My dad used to work out all the time when he still had his life together. The kids at his school used to call him Jean-Claude while he was picking up their Checkermint wrappers,” Eddie will explain when things start feeling semi stable again in the morning. 

For now though he’s just slumped over Robocop bed covers to dry heave. Richie is squished back into the headboard. He tries to distract himself watching Dennis and Arvin obtusely wave Beatles cassette tapes and Levi 501’s around on sale in the middle of Russia. Only Dennis’ swooped haircut looks bright blue. And the prospect of them getting caught and made political prisoners genuinely sort of anxiety-inducing. “I think I’m getting a fever right now,” Richie says, giving up on it. 

“Stranger things have happened. Probably ‘cause you ran around the world’s wettest woods in Dolfin shorts all night,” Eddie says back miserably. “Take your shirt off.” 

“Unless laying next to Mary Jo Catlett is a dying wish of yours, nah.”

“What’s that meant to mean?”

“Sorry. If you think Mary Jo is cool that’s fine too. Admirable, actually.” 

“You got her tattooed on your chest or what?”

Although Eddie minorly bursts into flames over everything this time somehow feels really cruel. Explaining why you don’t want to take your clothes off is a million times worse than actually taking your clothes off, all teenage boys know that, even fake ones. Until they turn twenty, doy. “You know! It means I’m never gonna be able to fit in my prom dress. My girls picked it out for me back when it was still cheerleading season and I wasn’t sitting around all day maxing on Frannie’s Turn and Magic Middles like a bum. Even my pa can’t get the zipper up, and _he_ works in sales.”

Eddie turns around after retching. He gives Richie a look that really spaces him out. It’s disapproving and afraid. (Mom.) “You’re not gonna fill out until you’re thirty, fucking twig.”

“My thing is meant to be because of stress, not age. And because I’m just generally dying. I don’t sleep most nights, I bleed all the time, my hair turned white earlier, I’ve had a migraine since sundown. If I’ve crossed all that off my list already I think I’m possibly, like, above age.”

“I can’t tell if you’re being serious or not.” 

“Capital S, dude. I don’t know what’s next. Loss of nipple brought on by...by restlessness and lack of focus...buttcheek inflation stimulated by existential boredom.” 

“Imagine the last one. They’d be like an ejector button for history lessons.” 

“Yeah, for real, cutting class but the body horror version. Mrs. Douglas would have just opened her mush to say ‘Vasco Da Gama’ and I’d be on my third ass rocket pitstop.” 

They giggle for what feels like a split second but is a whole two commercials’ worth. The last is a weirdly eerie computer one. Trying to rip off the Superbowl Mac feature with the whole not-showing-the-product, George Orwell spoof that ends up not really saying anything. It creeps Richie out so bad he wants to ask to turn it off. “I bet that happens to a lot of kids, though,” Eddie says, laying in a stabbed position, making everything worse. “When you’re dealing with stuff. Stuff like grief.”

Richie goes to itch his leg but also accidentally whips bolt upright and ends up having to make it into an odd Robot Princess impression. “How’s everything gonna be with Adam?” He asks, the most ham-fisted subject switch he’s ever made. One dead kid and he’s a huge chump. 

Luckily Eddie’s going through the same thing. Where he’d usually be defensive and suspicious he now just paps his hands over his face. “So, so, so, so not good.” 

“He’s taking it all pretty hard so far?”

“ _No_. That’s the whole awful crux of it. I, um, got kind of soft on him in the first place ‘cause he was always talking about how many feelings he had. Like, this guy everybody thought was a total Hasselhoff writing love poems in his bedroom, that made me so crazy. Then ever since Simon’s been missing Adam only brings him up when it’a a teacher asking why instead of his 8k Julius Caesar paper he’s just written out the Cosby Show rap or...or some old lady wanting to pat him on the shoulder while we’re walking home. It’s just super fucking disappointing. And I was wanting to maybe even break it off with him but now this is gonna peg me into some supportive housewife thing.” 

Caught somewhere between relief that Eddie sanely doesn’t think AD from planet Melmac-Maine is cool anymore and life-ruining distress that he and AD might be the same person, Richie sinks so far into his pillow the fabric pops his glasses off. “Yeesh. I guess it won’t be forever.”

“It won’t but it’ll be so intense. I’ll have to cradle him.” 

“Dude, intense is a godsend when it comes to not really caring about something. You get to play act it so freaking hard. Like, you just get him and go -” He wriggles upright as this feels like a more Eddie-ish position. Head Of The Class is back on. Lesson learned, Dennis, lesson learned. “Oh _Adam_. Your chest feels so big and sturdy when it's all racked with sobs like this. You’re like this huge, strong, mucus-riddled ox. Like a hardy stallion, the buck tooth horse from Hot To Trot. Like a fearsome boar.”

“Am I some kind of slutty farmer in this?”

“Always, buster. There’s a thing with damaged men and being called animals. Truthfully it’s how I beat the big G myself. Stan and Patty just called me ‘common warthog’ until I could see color again.”

Eddie peeks a moody eye out from between his fingers. “Well if _I_ was fake comforting Adam I’d go way funnier with it,” he says, touching the back of Richie’s neck ‘cause he wants to run a demo. “ _Awwwwww, Adam!_ Although it totally breaks me seeing you like this I’d be remiss if I didn’t tell you how _adorable_ you are. You wanna sit in my lap? You want me to _mother_ you? You want me to wash your locks and sing you a lullaby? Dun-dun-dunh, da-la-da-da-da-dunh.” He tickles Richie to the beat of _Tears Of A Clown_ ‘til he’s shoved off.

“You’re gonna have to start - burping him,” Richie says mid-attack. 

“Yeah. I’m like thumping the shit out of his back and then I’m like -“ a cough. “I’m gonna make you a m _aaaaa_ n.” Eddie cocks his chin down into a genuinely quite good Sassy magazine pose. He’s either Johnny Depp or Mayim Bialik (zero gray area) and is gilded with disconcerting cover lines like ‘how do I cope with my STD?’ and ‘Jason Bateman’s rom-com watchlist’ and ‘meet the sassiest boys in communist China’. Richie snorts at him, despite dipping out of reality again. The new sound of construction outside has disoriented him. Eddie’s dad’s house is on what Mayor Husock would call a ‘problem street’. It’d seen the crossbow murders, the sinkhole, the fire hydrant flood that drowned Maddie Mulligan’s puppies. It figures the PCU guys work through the night here. Richie can’t tell if one of them’s just started on the jackhammer or if Eddie’s just got really close to him. His head-fuck is giving him a kind of synesthesia. 

He looks at the ceiling which feels like waking up from a long nap. There he sees Eddie again, who has moved closer. He’s still pulling a stupid model face. “You want a little sugar, Adam?” He teases.

“Yeah,” Richie says, randomly. 

Eddie flips an invisible sheet of hair from his shoulders. Then he starts to lean across Richie with his face down, like he’s about to sniff his pit, and stops with his left cheek close to Richie’s right. Richie feels the weirdest shit he ever felt. It’s like dissociation and bead-eyed _interest_ that’s so big and terrible he feels like he’s a magnet and Eddie’s face is a giant Pepsi Tropical all in one. “You sure?” Comes Eddie’s voice from ten galaxies away. The force races. Whatever metaphysical scrap of Richie is left makes his face touch Eddie’s.

“Yeah,” Richie says again. 

Eddie twists his jaw so his breath meets earlobe and eyelash. The curiosity spikes to Richie’s neck like a guillotine. It’s the Geraldo TV special only Geraldo’s a zitty narcoleptic junior in bedtime compression socks and Al Capone’s excavated vault is, like, enlightenment. Then for the old dirt and the empty bottle: Eddie blows a loud, wet raspberry in Richie’s ear. 

He pulls back with an arm over his head. “And scene!” He declares, then flops on his back as the national anthem plays for TV sign off. 

Richie falls sort of* asleep some time after that. *He can’t tell if he’s having really vivid dreams or hallucinations or he just keeps waking up for strange little interludes. There’s one where he tells Eddie about watching the section 28 protests on TV. Eddie says it sounds cool but British people set his teeth on edge, Richie says he agrees but he also wishes he was British so he could be as funny as Billy Connolly. Then another where Eddie’s crying slightly. “And that’s why I stopped being your friend, Rich, because you don’t love people, you need people,” he whimpers. “People are just something you need to escape into. I didn’t know how to exist in that. It made me too sad.” Finally, the clearest of all is one of Mom. She stands at the end of Eddie’s bed. Doesn’t say anything, but she’s so there you can smell her roll on deodorant, and hear her ragged breathing. Richie wants to tell her what she’s missed on TV or something. Even in death he can only know how to talk to her about TV. Alas, she’s gone in a few blinks. And Richie stares at Eddie’s tomato print wallpaper and Germ Free Adolescents poster for so long, remembering where the shape of her had been, knowing what it’s like to miss her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hope this chapter is okay!!! ive been feeling down about this fic/my writing generally (it’s so embarrassing to let hits and stats on here get to you but i’m a fool) so apologies if any frustration comes across. i’m also writing a long one shot which is humiliatingly similar to this but with eddie pov so that’s fun. 
> 
> i updated the carrd (tebrefs.carrd.com) to include a proper menu where you can check all chapters’ refs now. will finally get chapter 1 on there soon. again i’ll say update in a month but depending on writer’s block/life stuff maybe a week or two longer. see ya,
> 
> maggie
> 
> P.S. I had to re upload this for formatting so sorry if anyone's subscribed and a got a load of emails

**Author's Note:**

> Me, sitting down at my laptop last month: I am going to create a fic that is so indulgent and rambling...  
>   
> Sorry if there’s a few inaccuracies, I wasn’t alive in the 80s(it is with a giant cringe that I admit endoscopies and gingivectomies were almost definitely not a thing back then), nor do I live in the USA, but I researched as much as poss.  
>   
> Updates will probably be a few weeks/a month apart.  
>   
> \- Maggie


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